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Yale Talks 


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Charles Reynolds Brown 


Dean of the Yale Divinity School 










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New Haven 
Yale University Press 
London : Humphrey Milford : Oxford University Press 


Mdccccxxiv 


COPYRIGHT, I919, BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


First published, September, 1919 
Second printing, March, 1920 
Third Printing, May, 1924 


Foreword 


HESE “Talks” were given in Battell Chapel 
at Yale University. Some of them were also 
given at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, 
Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin, Brown and other 
colleges. In putting them in book form I have 
retained the more intimate style of direct address 
as best preserving the atmosphere of personal 
conference in which they were first uttered. They 
are brought together here in the hope that they 
may be of use to other young men who are making 
up their minds as to their mode of life and decid- 
ing upon the purposes which are to rule the great 
years that lie ahead. 
Cuas. R. Brown. 
Yale University, 
June 18, 1919. 





Contents 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The True Definition ofa Man. . 9 

II. The Value of an Empty Purse. . 24 
III. The Lure of Goodness. . . . 39 
IV. How Old Are You?. . . ee BS 
V. The Power of a Resolute veel A inane 
VI. Unconscious Influence. . . . 84 
VII. The Lessons of Failure. . . . 7 


VIII. The Men Who Make Excuse. . 112 
IX. The Power of Sentiment . . . 126 
X. The Wounds of Wrongdoing . . 141 


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1 





I 
The True Definition of a Man 


HERE is one question I would like to ask 
you now that the examinations are over. It’ 
is a question every fellow must answer as he 
makes his way up to his maturity and when he 
gets his marks they are not made on paper, they 
are made on him. He may not answer my ques- 
tion in writing, but he will answer it in the choice 
he makes of a ruling ambition. How would you 
define a man? What does it mean to be a man? 
When we look back we find that a great variety 
‘of answers has been given to this question. 
There was a time when everybody said, “Man is 
a victim.” He is “a victim crying in the night and 
with no language but a cry.” He is cursed by the 
gods, doomed to eat his bread by hard labor in 
the sweat of his brow. He is at the mercy of all 
manner of demons and hobgoblins with which the 
ancients peopled the unseen world. He is a poor 
worm of the dust, not entitled to hold up his head 
among these titanic forces which are hostile to 
him. ‘Man is a victim,” and they said it with a 
whine. 
We find a curious remnant of that notion in our 


9 


Yale Talks 


own day. Some men are still saying, “Heredity 
and environment have us bound hand and foot.” 
They insist that there is no such thing as freedom, 
no power of initiative, no will to choose. Man 
does not as he chooses, but as he must. We are 
what we are by the operation of forces which we 
cannot control. Whatever is had to be, whatever 
will be will be, whether we like it or not. Gloomy, 
disheartened determinism is not confined to a few 
sad-eyed philosophers shut up in a closet—it is 
sometimes proclaimed from the housetops and 
preached at the street corners. There are those 
who still insist that man is a helpless victim. 

But that idea has largely passed for people who 
are in sound health mentally as well as physically. 
Man saw a long time ago that he need not be a 
poor shuddering victim. He saw that he could 
have dominion over the fish of the sea and the 
fowl of the air, over the cattle and the creeping 
things. He saw that he could compel heat and 
light, gravitation and electricity to minister to 
his own comfort and progress. He began to make 
himself at home among these titanic forces. He 
learned to stand erect and to read. He began to 
face the world undaunted. And whatever answer 
we might get from Young America today we may 
be sure that it would not accept the verdict that 
man is a victim. 

We come then to a second answer which has 
more edge on it. How would you define a man? 

TO 


I—True Definition of a Man 


There was a time when everyone said, “Man is a 
fighter.”” He stood in a militant attitude, fighting 
the common enemies of hunger and cold, disease 
and death, fighting also the neighboring tribes and 
making enemies of them. Every man was meas- 
ured by the length and the strength of his sword. 
The greatest man in the tribe was the man who 
could kill the largest number of his enemies 
without being killed in the process. : 

In ancient Israel Saul was made king because 
he stood head and shoulders above his fellows. 
He was neither a wise man nor a good man, but he 
was a big, strapping, successful fighter and they 
crowned him. In medieval Europe the men most 
honored were the plumed knights and the hel- 
meted warriors, who went forth with sword and 
spear to fight their good fights. In Japan the 
ancient aristocracy, the Samurai, belonged entirely 
to the military class. War was a trade and the 
trade held in highest esteem. If we had asked our 
question then, the answer would have come back 
with a clash of steel—‘‘Man is a fighter.” 

We find also a considerable remnant of that 
idea in our own day. The ladies have a way of 
indicating that their gentle hearts are strangely 
stirred by the sight of marching men in khaki. 
And men will pay larger sums of money for a 
briefer period of entertainment to witness a prize 
fight than for almost any kind of performance 
which can be named. The most respectable na- 

11 


Yale Talks 


tions show a strange satisfaction in their Krupp 
guns and dreadnoughts. If we should ask our 
question now, in some quarters the answer would 
still come back, “Man is a fighter.” 

But that mood is passing. The high office of 
Civilization is not to destroy men’s lives but to 
save them and train them in productive effort. 
The swords will have to be beaten into plough- 
shares. With the keen competition and the close 
margins in business, we have no steel to waste. 
The bright metal of the nation’s young manhood 
must more and more move out along those lines 
of action which are productive rather than de- 
structive. 

I say all this in the face of the most terrible war 
which has ever devastated the earth. Where there 
were ten men five years ago thinking about “a 
league of nations,” or some other effective method 
of keeping the peace and good order of the world, 
now there are a hundred. The thought of making 
the idea of public justice the determining factor 
in the life of the race has been taken out of the 
hands of impossible dreamers and brought upon 
the map of practical statesmanship. The ideals 
of the common people have been changing rapidly. 
When the people of France were asked some ten 
years ago to express their judgment in a great 
popular vote as to who was the greatest French- 
man in history, nine millions of ballots were cast. 
When the votes were counted, it was found that 

12 


T—True Definition of a Man 


the largest number had not been given to Napo- 
leon, the man of battles, who destroyed the lives 
of a million men. The largest number had been 
given to Pasteur, the man of science, who in the 
quiet work of his laboratory laid the foundations 
for saving the lives of untold millions. Man is 
not mainly nor permanently a fighter. 

We come then to a third and more practical 
answer—‘Man is a producer, a money-maker.” 
The greatest man in any group is the man who 
makes the most, if he makes it honestly. Men 
go about measuring each other not with yard- 
sticks, nor by the length of their swords, but with 
bank notes. Here is a man who is fifty thousand 
feet high! Here is another man who is one hun- 
dred thousand feet high. Here is a third man who 
is a million feet high—he is a millionaire! And 
here at the side is a poor chap who is decidedly 
“short.” He is no taller than thirty cents. 

The love of money lies at the root of all manner 
of things good and bad. It stirs up wholesome 
ambitions and it arouses the meanest desires of 
the heart. The wish to better one’s condition is 
honest and legitimate, but the spirit of greed 
becomes responsible for the lowest vices and 
crimes. 

There are men who believe in what they call 
“the economic interpretation of history.” They 
insist that history was not shaped by great men 
nor by great principles, but by the economic con- 


13 


Yale Talks 


ditions under which men found themselves. Men 
were thrust in this direction or in that by their 
Jove of wealth or by their lack of it. They insist 
that the desire for gain has been the determining 
principle in human action. 

I can not hold with them, but I confess that 
there is something about the career of a man who 
organizes and develops some industry to the point 
where he accumulates a large fortune which 
appeals to me strongly. The people who inherit 
their wealth do not necessarily amount to any- 
thing—all they had to do was to wait for some- 
body to die. The men who gamble for their 
fortunes, whether they do it on the stock exchange 
or at a green table, are not interesting to me—in 
order to become rich they made other men poor. 
But the man who goes out with nothing but his 
own energy of body and cleverness of brain to 
a mill or a mine, a farm or a factory, a store or a 
railroad, and by enlarging the scope of it as a 
social utility becomes rich, that man appeals to 
me most strongly. 

And I have noticed that the young man, who 
talks scornfully about money and money-making 
as being entirely beneath his notice, is usually in- 
sincere or looney. Money is a very nice thing, 
a very necessary thing, and no man of sense 
speaks scornfully of money. And because the 
desire for gain does enter so powerfully into 
human experience, if we should ask our question 


14 


I—True Definition of a Man 


about the definition of a man in the market place, 
the answer might come back from a thousand 
throats, ‘Man is a money-maker, and the greatest 
man here is the man who makes the most, if he 
makes it honestly.” 

But this answer will not stand. It leaves un- 
provided for great areas of man’s nature. We 
cannot define the nature or measure the success | 
of any man in terms of dollars and cents. “How 
much is that man worth?” we sometimes ask. 
Ordinarily we are not thinking of the worth of the 
man, but merely of the value of the things he 
happens to own. This can be easily ascertained 
from Bradstreet or the assessor’s book or from 
his report on income tax. The worth of the man 
is another question altogether—it turns upon his 
qualities of mind and heart, upon the amount of 
good he has done and the character he has won. 
He may be worth a great deal in addition to the 
things he owns, or with a vast abundance of things 
he may not be worth enough to pay for the powder 
and shot it would require to blow him up. The 
worth of the man is a question of personality. 

The current ideals are changing here. When 
I was a boy the names of the richest men in 
America were names to conjure with; they sent 
a thrill through any popular audience. The 
names of the richest men in America today are 
not always names to conjure with. It all depends 
upon the measure of public spirit and the quality 


T5 


Yale Talks 


of personal character in the man. The thought 
of man as a money-maker does not touch the 
deeper things of life, and this answer, therefore, 
will not stand. 

We come then to an answer which would re- 
ceive more acceptance on a college campus— 
“Man is a thinker.” The true measure of a man 
is not to be found in the length of his sword or in 
the size of his roll of bank notes, but in those 
curious gray convolutions of the brain which make 
possible his intellectual life. The man of insight 
and judgment, of outlook and discrimination! 
The man of original and creative ability—here 
surely we find man at his best. 

And if the man can not only think but write, 
then how great he becomes! Here is a man who 
can sit down without weapons or wealth, with no 
army at his back, with no powerful organization 
to give him influence—with nothing but pen, 
paper and ink! By what he writes he can influ- 
ence men by the thousand, by the million, it may 
be! Men of his own land and of all lands, men 
of his own day and men of generations yet un- 
born! ‘There is not an hour in the twenty-four 
when the sun is not shining straight down at high 
noon somewhere on the plays of Shakespeare and 
the poems of Dante. There is not a land nor a 
language where the orations of Moses and Isaiah, 
the songs of David and the proverbs of Solomon, 
the letters of Paul and the parables of Jesus, are _ 

16 


1—True Definition of a Man 


not exercising their influence upon the aspirations 
and the conduct of men. Great is the man who 
can think, and think until he has something to say, 
and then say it in such fashion as to lodge his 
truth in the life of the race! Surely we find man 
here at his best! 

We have coined this estimate into proverbs, 
“Knowledge is power.” “The world belongs to 
the man who knows.” “Wisdom is the principal © 
thing. Therefore get wisdom and with all thy 
getting get understanding.” And the names to 
conjure with today are the names of Plato and 
Aristotle at one end of the line and Kant and 
Hegel, Darwin and Huxley, Edison and Metch- 
nikoff, at the other. These are the men who show 
human nature at its best, for man is beyond all 
else a thinker! 

Now far be it from me to utter one syllable in 
depreciation of knowledge. This last answer is 
not an unworthy one, but is an imperfect one. It 
does not reach that which is fundamental. I have 
passed in review these four answers, the victim 
with his whine, the fighter with his sword, the 
money-maker with his roll of bank notes, and the 
thinker with his book. In my judgment not one 
of them is worthy to stand. 

Here in the house of the Lord suppose we ask 
the Lord Himself how He would define a man. 
We will appeal from these lower courts to the 
highest in order to have a Supreme Court decision 


17 


Yale Talks 


on this vital question. “OQ Thou who knowest 
what was in man and needed not that any should 
tell Thee, how wouldst Thou define a man?” 

Listen! ‘Ye know that among the Gentiles the 
great ones exercise lordship and dominion. It 
shall not be so among you. If any man would be 
great among you, let him serve. The greatest of 
all is the servant of all.” 

Man at his best is a servant. He rises as he 
stoops to serve. He reaches his greatness through 
his competence and his willingness to serve. This 
is what the Perfect Man said and this is what the 
Perfect Man did. “He took upon Himself the 
form of a servant and went about doing good.” 
Wherefore God and the ages have exalted Him 
until His name is above every name. 

You can see at a glance that we have now 
reached that which is fundamental. The life of 
any individual will be measured and estimated in 
the long run by its utility in serving the more 
permanent interests of human society. In the 
great kingdom of moral reality, usefulness is the 
ultimate standard. Ideally, ‘Man is a servant.” 

What made those two men, born the same year, 
one on that side of the water, one on this, men so 
unlike in the whole outward setting of their lives 
and so essentially in agreement in spirit—what 
made those two men, William Ewart Gladstone 
and Abraham Lincoln so highly esteemed and so 
widely beloved? 

18 


I—True Definition of a Man 


Gladstone was born to wealth, his home was in 
a castle. He had a fine social position from the 
first, every house in England was open to him 
from Buckingham Palace down. He had all that 
education could do for a man—he was a graduate 
of Christ Church College in Oxford University. 
_ He enjoyed the benefits of foreign travel. He was 
one of the handsomest men of his day and 
thoroughly accustomed to all of the amenities of 
social life in one of the great capitals of the world. 
He thrice became Prime Minister of the British 
Empire and was esteemed great. 

Abraham Lincoln was poor. He was born ina 
log cabin. He was never allowed to attend school 
but twelve months in his whole life. He gained 
his education mainly as he lay upon the floor 
before an open fire piled with pine knots reading 
such books as he could command. He was one 
of the homeliest men who ever walked and he 
knew little about the conventions of “society.” 
He was never outside of the United States. But 
he, too, became genuinely great. 

These men were esteemed because they lived 
and died to serve. However men might agree or 
disagree with some of the policies of Gladstone, 
they came to feel that here was a man bent upon 
laying his splendid abilities upon the altar of ser- 
vice in the British Empire. And Abraham Lincoln 
lived in the spirit of that Book which John Hay, 
his secretary, tells us lay always on his desk, and 


1Q 


Yale Talks 


in which he was accustomed to read every day. 
The Book says, “Whosoever saveth his life shall 
lose it, but whosoever loseth his life for My sake 
shall find it.”’ Lincoln found himself, he found his 
place in the hearts of his countrymen, and he 
found his niche in the temple of fame because he 
lived and died to serve. 

It was so in the life of the Perfect Man. He 
took these broken lights of human greatness and 
set them in their true perspective. He also suf- 
fered, but not as unwilling victim—He suffered 
as one who freely sacrificed Himself for others. 
He, too, was a fighter, but never with the carnal 
weapons which destroy men’s lives. He fought 
with those spiritual weapons, instruction, persua- 
sion, moral appeal, the power of right example, 
which are mighty through God to the pulling down 
of the strongholds of evil. He was rich in per- 
sonal endowment and in high privilege, yet for 
our sakes He became poor that by His poverty 
He might make many rich. He was a thinker— 
He could speak as never man spake, and say 
without fear of contradiction, “I am the Truth.” 
But underneath all else He was a servant. He 
translated the language of religion into terms of 
life as “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among 
us full of grace and truth.’”’ He became the Eternal 
Servant of that larger good which waits upon the 
spirit of unselfish devotion. 

Let me read you a single leaf from the book of 

20 


I—True Definition of a Man 


experience! It is not a newspaper story—it 
occurred in my own parish while I was a pastor 
in California. There was a woman, a wife and 
a mother, who had undergone a capital surgical 
operation. She did not rally afterward. The loss 
of blood and the nervous shock brought her to 
the verge of death. The surgeons after a hasty 
consultation told her husband that unless some- 
thing radical was done at once her life could not 
be saved; that indeed the only hope lay in the’ 
transfusion of blood from some healthy, vigorous 
body. 

She had three sons, great, strapping fellows in 
the heyday of their youth. When the facts were 
made known to them, they offered themselves at 
once. The surgeon took them apart in the ad- 
joining room and had them strip that he might 
hastily decide which one would best serve. If 
any one of them had allowed his blood to be 
tainted by some wretched vice, if he had depleted 
his vitality by some miserable indulgence, he 
would have been cut off in that high hour from 
the chance of serving the mother in her time of 
peril. The surgeon ran them over and found 
every one of them sound, clean, abundantly alive. 
They were all fit—any one of them would do. 
One of them was chosen and the artery of strength 
was opened and connected with the veins of 
weakness. Then the heart of that young man, 
clean in every sense of the word, pumped out of 

21 


Yale Talks 


its own store of life a fresh stock of vitality into 
that other life which trembled on the brink. The 
mother’s life was saved and restored. She is 
alive today, rejoicing in the companionship of 
those three fine sons. 

How splendid that they were in shape to do it! 
How fine that in the years past they had so lived 
that when the call came not one of them needed 
to flinch. All unwittingly for her sake they had 
lived the life. It is the strongest incentive to 
righteousness, it is the strongest deterrent from 
evil that I know—the thought of serving some 
other life in a time of emergency which may be 
physical or mental or moral. For her sake, for 
his sake, “for their sakes, I sanctify myself” and 
live the life. 

Give me your answer then—How would you 
define a man? What do you propose to show to 
the world thirty years from now and say to it, 
“This is my conception of what it means to be a 
man.” If you show it a victim whining because 
life has been hard and the luck has been against 
you, you will be ashamed of yourself every time 
you look in the glass. If you show it a fighter, 
beating and bruising your way, injuring others in 
order to succeed, all of your friends will be 
ashamed of you. If you show it nothing but a 
money-maker, feathering your own nest to make 
it soft and warm, you will deny all the best tradi- 
tions of this university. If you show it merely a 

aa 


I—True Definition of a Man 


thinker, who does not carry his insights over into 
achievements and translate his knowledge into 
power for service, then still your life will be 
barren. But if you will say to yourself, “Man isa 
servant,” and allow that thought to rule your life, 
then you will count one in that sacramental host 
which is destined to trample evil in the dust and 
make this earth at last as fair as the sky. 


23 


II 
The Value of an Empty Purse 


ERE is a short story about a young man 

who had been having his fling! He had 
come into a large fortune early in life, which is 
always a perilous experience. Where a young 
fellow earns his money by the sweat of his own 
brow he usually learns something about the value 
of money. Where he earns his pleasure by hard 
work first, he knows something about the real 
meaning of pleasure. But where all this is thrust 
into his hand by a piece of generosity which he 
calls “good fortune” and God calls “misfortune” 
oftentimes, he is liable to make a mess of it. 

This young fellow had also been living abroad, 
which is another perilous experience. He had 
gathered all together and had taken his journey 
into a far country. The young man in Paris or 
Vienna with a big bank account or a generous 
letter of credit is not nearly so well placed as he 
would be if he were earning his own living plowing 
corn in South Dakota or working in a factory in 
Paterson, New Jersey. 

The odds were against him—it would have 
taken a strong moral nature to have faced that 


24 


[I—Value of an Empty Purse 


combination of circumstances successfully, and 
this young fellow had not the necessary stuff in 
him to do it. He fell down. He wasted his sub- 
stance in riotous living. He made friends with 
men who were bad and with women who were 
worse. He went the pace and it was rapid. He 
thought he was having the time of his life—in his 
poor silly little head that was all he knew. But 
‘he soon came to the end of his time such as it 
was—he' bumped his way down the cellar stairs 
until he found himself at the bottom. “He had 
spent all and he began to be in want.” He took 
out his purse and there was nothing in it—not 
asou. And just there “he came to himself.” He 
began for the first time to get his bearings. He 
saw the value of an empty purse. 

What help did this young man get out of his 
pocketbook when it was as flat as his own feel- 
ings? In the first place, he was compelled to cut 
out a lot of evil indulgences.” It costs money to 
be downright wicked. No man can travel the 
primrose path unless he has the price. He may 
have been in the habit of getting drunk, but if he 
is entirely out of money he will have to live 
soberly for a while. He may have been indulging 
in the excitement of gambling, but with an empty 
purse he will have to call a halt on that form of 
vice. He may have been making merry with 
harlots as this fellow had been doing, but without 
money he cannot go on—their smiles have to be 


25 


Yale Talks 


paid for in cash. The way of the transgressor is 
expensive as well as hard—and it grows harder 
and more expensive the longer a man travels it. 
This is God’s own good way of reminding the 
transgressor that he is off the track. 

This young man had to stop because his money 
was gone—he could not pay for any more dissi- 
pation. It is an honor to a man when he can walk 
the streets of the wickedest city on earth with a 
full purse and turn his back on all the allurements 
to wrongdoing. He could, but he will not, because 
he is a man of principle. If, however, a man has 
not reached that level of moral development he 
had better have his supplies cut off for a season. 
If he is unable to carry a full purse and run 
straight, let him carry an empty one for a time. 
It was a distinct advantage to this young man to 
be cut off from further indulgence by his lack of 
means. “He had spent all and began to be in 
want”—and at the same time he began to be a 
man. 

In the second place, his empty purse compelled 
him to go to work. He had to do it to put bread 
in his mouth. He was “perishing with hunger and 
no man gave to him.” He, therefore, stood out in 
the open and said to the world, “Make me a hired 
servant. From this hour let me pull my own 
weight in the boat and earn my way man-fashion.” 

The sting of want—it is the only thing that is 
sharp enough to transform many an idler into a 

26 


II—Value of an Empty Purse 


worker! It takes the hard slap of necessity to 
change the spender into a producer. You meet 
droves of people who have fallen into the easy, 
disgraceful habit of eating their bread by the 
sweat of other men’s brows. They are parasites 
on the social body, feeding on the vitality of 
others without producing anything of their own. 
They are like those fat, lazy, green worms, which 
crawl around on the trees in the spring filling 
themselves with food which they did nothing to 
produce. They have not energy enough to change 
the green leaves into any decent sort of flesh 
color. They simply lay their food around their 
bodies in soft, green wads—you can look at them 
and tell what they ate last. 

Heaven be praised for hard work! Heaven be 
praised for the necessity which makes it for most 
of us not an elective but a required course! We 
might not take it otherwise—it is so easy to look 
for snap courses in the world. It is the making 
of a man; it furnishes the necessary discipline to 
transform human pulp into manhood with some 
genuine mental and moral fibre in it. 

Let every soul offer that same prayer—“Make 
me the hired servant of my own need and of the 
common good.” Wherever men and women are 
allowed to go on indefinitely, finding the way 
greased for them by lavish expenditure and gener- 
ous tips, with no chance to come into contact with 
the rough side of the board, they are liable to 


27 


Yale Talks 


bring up in perdition. ‘Endure hardness as a 
good soldier of Jesus Christ,” Paul said once to 
a young man he had in tow. ‘Study to show thy- 
self a workman that need not be ashamed.” It 
is in that direction that honor lies. 

It would be a great gain if every young man 
had to face the world with his coat off; if he were 
compelled to lay hold on some difficult task with 
both hands; if he were made to lift on some heavy 
load until the sweat came; if he were set to think 
hard upon some problem until he felt the tug of 
it on his own brain. It is by that process that 
muscle and gray matter and character are de- 
veloped. 

It is by meeting some situation which offers a 
challenge to the best powers a man has and meet- 
ing it without flinching that he adds cubits to his 
stature. What under Heaven is life for but just 
that! And I am afraid that hundreds of us might 
not do it unless we had to. It is the empty purse, 
the sting of want, the thrust of necessity which 
drives many a man out and bids him strive. 

Hear this word of Edison, the great worker as 
well as the great inventor of our day! ‘‘Genius,” 
he says, “may be two per cent inspiration, but it is 
ninety-eight per cent perspiration.” One of his 
assistants told me that Edison worked for ten 
years to invent his storage battery, which would 
harness the forces of the lightning to the homely 
tasks of earth; and that during that period he was 

28 


1]—Value of an Empty Purse 


always in his laboratory at seven-thirty every 
morning. He had his lunch sent to him in the 
shop. He went home to dinner, but he usually 
came back in the evening to have another try at 
it in the quiet of the night. 

He was there working, often until midnight, 
while thousands of empty-headed pleasure seekers 
of whom the world will never hear were dancing 
up and down the great White Ways of earth with 
more dollars than sense. He made hundreds of 
experiments during those years. He built models 
by the score and then discarded them. But 
through repeated failure he moved ahead to a 
splendid success. He invented his storage battery 
and the whole world is richer for what he did. 
And he tells us that his highest joy in life has 
been found in matching his strength and skill 
against baffling problems and seeing them finally 
win out. 

In these recent years we have been putting rub- 
ber tires on pretty much everything and it has 
not always been an unmixed advantage. We need 
some of the jolts. It is possible to make life so 
easy and comfortable as to fail of the best results. 
With high-priced kindergartens at one end of the 
educational system making the business of learn- 
ing a sweet little game and with certain colleges 
at the other end of the system offering unlimited 
electives and no very searching requirements, 
there are young people who may get it into their 


29 


Yale Talks 


heads that there is such a thing as “painless edu- 
cation.” Painless education to match the “pain- 
less dentistry” we sometimes see advertised, 
chiefly by quacks! 

There is no such thing—it cannot be done. You 
cannot be carried to the skies of mental and moral 
efficiency on flowery beds of ease, it matters not 
how much money you are prepared to pay for the 
privilege. There are no parlor cars on the trains 
which run that way. Somewhere along the road, 
all along the road, I would say, there must be hard, 
serious, manly study. The only men who arrive 
are the men who take the middle of the road with 
all the dust and discomfort that may involve and 
put it through. They work out their own salva- 
tion. And when they get it worked out it is 
salvation. 

In the county where my father lived for fifty 
years there was a young man about my own age, 
who was born to wealth. He had a home filled 
with comforts and luxuries. His father generously 
gave him a good education, the advantages of 
travel and all the other good things which money 
could buy. In that case the result was that when 
the young man was forty years old he had failed 
in his chosen profession, he had added nothing 
whatever to the moral forces of the community 
and he was a very indifferent sort of citizen. He 
was simply one hundred and eighty-five pounds 
of well-dressed meat. He was bewailing the poor 


30 


II—Value of an Empty Purse 

use he had made of his life to a friend one day. 
He remarked, “The best thing my father could 
have done for me when I was twenty years old 
would have been to have given me a half a dollar 
and kicked me out into the street.”’ “George,” 
the friend replied, “why did you not take a half a 
dollar and kick yourself out?” He had not the 
strength of mind to do it. He had genuine ability 
and a great deal of personal charm, and I have | 
the feeling that an empty purse might have been 
the making of him. 

Who was it who said this, “My Father worketh 
even until now and I work’? His highest concep- 
tion of God was of a Being who from the first 
hour when the morning stars sang together down 
through the countless ages, had been engaged in a 
ceaseless, tireless, beneficent putting forth of His 
energy in work. His highest conception of human 
life was embodied in the action of a Man who took 
upon Himself the form of a servant, went about 
doing good and kept it up until He could say, “I 
have finished the work Thou gavest me to do.” 
The Master worked voluntarily because He was 
the Perfect, the Typal, the Representative Man, 
the Son of Man. But however it comes, whether - 
from choice or from necessity, from a high resolve 
or from the promptings of an empty purse, honor 
that impulse which sends you forth to your own 
appointed work. 

In the third place, the young man’s empty purse 


31 


Yale Talks 


enabled him to see the difference between false 
friends and true. While he was rich he was im- 
mensely popular. He had friends galore, as he 
thought. He was “a good spender,” as the foolish 
phrase runs, and he found plenty of foolish 
friends, male and female, to help him spend his 
money. He was courted and flattered on all sides. 
He thought that all those people liked him when 
as a matter of fact they merely liked his money. 

The moment his money was gone he found that 
all those false friends were gone, too. “He began 
to be in want and no man gave to him”—that was 
the heartbreaking part of it. Among all those fol- 
lowers who had been drawn about him by his reck- 
less spending there was not a man nor a woman 
who cared enough for him to give him a meal. 
His fat purse had blinded him to their real charac- 
ters, but now with an empty purse as a field glass 
he could see them as they were, and he saw them 
vanishing in the distance as rats leave a sinking 
ship. 

It is good for us to get down to hardpan now 
and then, where we are liked or disliked not for 
what we have, but for what we are. It is good 
for us to meet men not as the paid servants of 
our pleasure nor as tradesmen eager for our pat- 
ronage, but simply man to man. No man’s life 
consists of the abundance nor of the scarcity of 
the things he possesses. The only friends worth 
having are those who take us not for what we 


32 


IiI—Value of an Empty Purse 


own, but for what we are. And those real friends 
are in no wise affected by the ups or downs in our 
bank accounts. But when a man’s purse is empty 
he knows “who’s who” without looking in a big 
red book. He can distinguish instantly between 
the false friends and the true. 
_ In one of Martin Maartens’ stories he speaks of 

the social habits in a certain city which had be- 
come hopelessly commercialized. If a man was 
poor they shouted his name at him in harsh tones 
as if they had been announcing the name of some 
small station on the railroad. If aman was worth 
a hundred thousand dollars they addressed him in 
tones of quiet respect. If he was worth two hun- 
dred thousand they gave him exactly twice as 
much deference. If he had a million they lowered 
their voices almost to a whisper and folded their 
hands in his presence as they did when they were 
in church. They did not reverence the man, but 
they reverenced his money. “They worshipped 
money,” the author says, “because they felt that 
a man who does not worship money is a socialist, 
and a socialist is an atheist, and an atheist is a 
man with no religion.” Therefore, because they 
were religious “after their kind” they worshiped 
money with a deep and holy reverence. In that 
city no one knew who his real friends were unless 
his purse was empty. 

There is a Friend that sticketh closer than a 
brother, whose feeling for us is in no wise affected 


33 


Yale Talks 


by our rating in Bradstreet. He was equally at 
home with Zaccheus, the richest man in Jericho, 
and with that blind beggar, who was the poorest 
man in Jerusalem. And He liked to construe His 
own relationships in terms of personal friendship. 
“T have called you friends,” He said one day to a 
group of eager, active, red-blooded, young men. 
“I have called you friends’—and friends they 
were, even though their means were small. Many 
a man flattered and pampered in the days of his 
prosperity never learns what a friend Jesus Christ 
can be until the hour strikes when all his pros- 
perity vanishes. In that hour, not knowing where 
else to look, he looks up, and sees a Friend. His 
purse is empty, but his heart is full because he 
has entered into that personal fellowship with an 
Eternal Friend, which is ennobling beyond any 
other influence which enters the human soul. Re- 
joice in the day of adversity if it enables you to 
see the difference between false friends and true. 

In the fourth place, the young man’s empty 
purse gave him a new standard of_values. He 
had been in the habit of purchasing his satisfac- 
tions with cash. He purchased some of them at 
the bar and some of them, the story says, in the 
brothel. He purchased some of them in worthier 
places, but they all came to him because he had 
the price. He had fallen into a way of thinking 
that there was nothing under Heaven or in Heaven 
which money would not buy. He said to himself, 


34 


II—Value of an Empty Purse 


“T am rich and increased with goods and have 
need of nothing.” Then God stripped him of all 
he had and set him out in the open, a poor, naked, 
shivering soul with nothing but an empty purse. 
In that very hour “he came to himself.” He 
saw himself as he was in the clear daylight of 
reality rather than in the night-light of thoughtless 
dissipation. He said, “I have sinned—but I will - 
make an about face. I have been wasting my sub- 
stance as a useless spender, now I will become a 
producer, the hired servant of the common good. 
I have been throwing away my chance in this far 
country. Now I will go back where I belong. I 
have cut myself off from those relationships which 
are wholesome and rewarding. Now I will arise 
and go to my father.” And he went, step by step, 
a long, tedious journey of moral renewal, but 
every step in the right direction. He went poor 
in purse, but rich in high resolve and in a new 
appreciation of those values which are supreme. 
You may, if you choose, allow your empty purse 
to make you sour—you can stand off looking with 
envy upon those who possess what you would like 
to possess and cannot. You may, if you choose, 
allow your empty purse to make you hard and 
defiant—you fling out your resentment at a world 
which has dealt you such a sorry hand with no 
kings and queens in it. You may, if you choose, 
allow your empty purse to become so heavy with 
the sense of disappointment which takes the place 


35 


Yale Talks 


of bank notes as to send you through life broken 
and depressed. All these lines of action are open 
to you, and mistaken men travel them all. But, 
if you choose, you may allow that bit of adversity 
to furnish you the chance to show yourself every 
inch a man, honored and valued for your personal 
qualities of mind and heart. In that event your 
empty purse will give you a new and better stan- 
dard of values. | | 

There was a young man once who came to 
Christ with great possessions. He was a clean- 
living, serious-minded fellow, who had kept all the 
commandments from his youth up. The Master 
looked him over and took his measure. Then He 
said to him in effect something like this, “There 
are men who have the necessary moral fibre to be 
masters of their possessions. There are rich men 
who enter the Kingdom of Heaven, administering 
their wealth in harmony with the great Christian 
ideals. It is not an easy task—it is like putting 
a camel through the eye of a needle—but by the 
grace of God it can be done.” And where a rich 
man is thoroughly Christian in all his acts and 
attitudes he is a kind of masterpiece in God’s 
gallery of good men. “But you,” Jesus said to 
the young ruler, “have not it in you to do that 
great thing. Your only safety lies in parting with 
your wealth and in following Me. You need to 
meet your fellow men and your Maker with an 
empty purse because your means have blinded you 

36 


II—Value of an Empty Purse 


thus far to the deeper things of life.” The young 
man would not meet that hard test—it was a chal- 
lenge to the best there was in him, but he refused. 
He turned away sorrowful for he loved money 
more than he loved manhood. 

How fine, on the other hand, are the moral 
results of self-sacrifice and discipline! It is good 
for everyone to learn how to subordinate his own 
personal comfort and pleasure to some larger 
interest. In that school the men who have the 
future in their hands are now being trained. The 
Head Master of Eton, the famous English boys’ 
school, was at one time a stern, old chap whose 
name was Keats. One winter morning he met a 
small boy who was crying. ‘“What’s the matter 
with you?” the Master called out, in his gruff way. 
“T’m cold,” the boy whimpered. “Cold, you must 
not complain of the cold. This is no girls’ school.” 

It was a harsh reply, but the sniveling boy had 
a spark of manhood in him which caught fire. He 
stopped crying and he never forgot that stern 
command. Fifteen years later he was riding at 
the head of his own regiment of Dragoons in 
India. When the order came to charge on the 
entrenched Sihks he gathered up his bridle rein, 
swung himself into the saddle and called out to a 
brother officer who had also studied at Eton, 
“Well, as old Keats used to say, “This is no girls’ 
school!’ but here goes!” Then he rode on, to his 
death, as the event proved, but the charge brought 


37 


Yale Talks 


victory that day to the English Army and the ex- 
tension of the British Empire there beneath the 
Southern Cross. How splendid are the results of 
discipline, bravely met and nobly born, in the 
making of that manhood which is the image of 
God on earth. 


38 


ae ee 


III 
The Lure of Goodness 


HERE is a feeling in certain quarters that. 

being good is dull work. There are men 
who talk as if wickedness would always be found 
interesting and exciting, where righteousness 
would be tame and spiritless. When young men . 
speak of going off to some great city to “see life” 
they usually have in mind something immoral. 
They think that that sort of thing is “life” and 
that the decencies are more or less dead. 

The newspapers have helped to create that 
notion. They give an inordinate amount of space 
to the vices and crimes of men—it is out of all 
proportion to the real significance of such action. 
A man may go straight along about his business 
for fifty years without ever causing anybody to 
look around. But if he does something out- 
rageously wicked he will be in all the papers next 
morning with headlines and pictures. The news- 
papers insist that this is “news.” They think that 
everybody will want to read about it. They have 
the same curious notion that wickedness is inter- 
esting while goodness is dull. 

Now my own feeling is that all those people are 


39 


Yale Talks 


just as crazy as they would be if they went around 
insisting that two and two make five or fifty. 
They have not learned to add or to subtract. 
They cannot even see the figures on the board and 
tell what they mean. The most fascinating pur- 
suit in the world is that of being good. The finest 
form of adventure upon which any man can enter 
is the quest for goodness and for God in the depths 
of his own soul. It has not become common 
enough to rob it of a certain air of romance. If 
you wish to find the zest and relish of life, do that. 
“The lure of goodness” is my theme and if I could 
lift it up so that you would see it as it is it would 
draw you to it. 

Here in the New Testament was One who made 
goodness interesting. He began His life in a pic- 
turesque sort of way. He was born in the manger 
of a stable, which was an odd place to be born. 
He grew up in a carpenter’s home and in a carpen- 
ter shop. He never saw the inside of a college, 
yet somehow He learned to think straight and to 
speak as never man spake. He had the courage 
of his convictions because He knew what He was 
talking about. When He was thirty years old 
He stood up boldly and said to the men of His 
day, “I am the Way, walk in it; and the Truth, 
believe it; and the Life, live it, and it will make 
you free.”” Some of the men who heard Him tried 
it, and they found that it was so. 

He went about turning the various maxims of 


40 


T[I—Lure of Goodness 


human conduct end for end. “It hath been said 
by them of old time, but I say unto you”—some- 
thing entirely different. And when He did that 
everyone saw that those principles of righteous- 
ness fitted into the needs of everyday life as they 
never had before. He went about turning things 
upside down, and when He did that people saw 
that for the first time things were right side up. 
He was free, brave, original, in His method of 
being good and when men watched Him live they 
went away saying, “We never saw it on this 
fashion.” 

He taught not as the scribes who had learned 
their lesson out of a book but as one having the 
authority of first-hand knowledge of spiritual 
things. He clothed His message in the ordinary 
words of everyday life, ‘and the common people 
heard Him gladly.” He said that the new prin- 
ciple of life He had come to introduce into the 
world was like “salt,” it was like “yeast,” it was 
like “mustard seed.” He compared it to all man- 
ner of homely things which had some punch in 
them. He said in a blunt way, “No man can serve 
two masters.”’ Men cannot serve God and money 
at the same time without getting things mixed. 
He said obedience to the law of God was like 
building one’s house on solid rock, and disobe- 
dience was like building it on the sand. He said 
that prayer is as simple and natural as the act 
of a child asking his father for bread or fish or an 


4I 


Yale Talks 


egg. And because those fathers in Palestine, 
faulty though they were, knew how to give good 
gifts to their children, they felt the force of the 
claim He made on behalf of prayer to the 
Heavenly Father. When the common people 
heard Him talking about goodness after that man- 
ner they followed Him about in droves as if He 
had been a circus procession instead of a teacher 
of religion. They had never heard it on that 
fashion before and they could not seem to get 
enough of it. 

He went habitually among the people who 
needed Him most. He chose publicans and sin- 
ners for His intimates and made saints of them. 
He picked up worthless beggars and women of 
the street and by the sheer contagion of His own 
life made new people of them. “I came not to 
call the righteous”—He said this with a smile for 
He knew that those self-satisfied prigs who were 
sneering at Him were anything but righteous—“I 
came not to call the righteous, but sinners to re- 
pentance.” He laid His strong, clean hands on 
lepers to their amazement for they had not felt 
the touch of healthy flesh for years; and when 
He took His hands away the lepers were cleansed. 
He told a lame man to stand up and walk and 
there was such a note of authority in His voice 
that the lame man tried and found to his joy that 
he could. He opened the eyes of the blind and 
unstopped the ears of the deaf, causing men to 


42 





Il {—Lure of Goodness 


see and to hear what they had never seen nor 
heard before. He loved men, bad men as often 
as not, because they needed it rather than because 
they deserved it. When He died He was not lying 
in a comfortable bed, he was hanging on a Cross. 
He was hanging there not bewailing His fate nor 
denouncing the men who had crucified Him. He 
was praying for them with a tenderness which 
ought to have melted a heart of stone—“Father, 
forgive them; for they know not.” And when He 
went out of this world He was carrying a penitent 
robber in His arms—“into Paradise,” He said. 
Now all that is interesting! There is not a dull 
line anywhere in the life of the Perfect, the Typal, 
the Representative Man, the Son of Man. We 
print and circulate more copies of the little book 
containing the story of His life a hundred times 
over than of any other volume you can name. It 
came out nineteen hundred years ago and it is 
still a best seller. We date our calendars from the 
date of His birth—r1919 we say, for it is just 
that long since He was born in the manger of the 
stable. We call the fairest portion of the globe 
“Christendom’’—His part of it. His words have 
become household words in more homes and in 
more hearts than those of any other one who ever 
walked the earth. He has a grip on the thoughts, 
the hopes and the high resolves of men at this 
hour which cannot be matched. He is interesting. 


43 


Yale Talks 


Lift Him up anywhere until men see Him as He 
is and He draws them to Him. 

How do you account for it? What is the secret 
of the interest which attaches to his style of good- 
ness? I can think of several elements in it which 
are suggestive. 

In the first place He was perfectly natural. He 
never posed. He never seemed to be playing a 
part. He was not being good to be seen of men. 
He never said to Himself, “(Now this is what would 
be expected of a man in my position.” He was 
what He was without ever seeming to think about 
how it might look to others—He was not con- 
cerned about that. _ 

You know Bernard Shaw says that if you go to 
a symphony concert you will find many people 
who are there not because they like classical music 
but because they know they ought to like it and 
that it is the proper thing to be seen at the sym- 
phony, and so they go. In like manner, when you 
get to Heaven you may find people there who are 
there not because they have any real taste or 
fitness for that sort of thing but because they feel 
that they owe it to their social position to be in 
Heaven. How mighty are the conventions of 
society and how dull and tiresome they make thou- 
sands of people who become slaves to them! 
Those people might be interesting if they would 
only be themselves. 

How simple and natural Jesus was. He lived 


44 


TI I—Lure of Goodness 


not as the scribes but as one whose goodness was 
vital. His life, therefore, was with power. 

He began his public ministry not in the syna- 
gogue nor at the temple but at a wedding. He 
wrought His first mighty work there because the 
,people He was interested in were at the wedding. 
- When He turned the water of the occasion into 
. wine the people felt that the best joy of their lives 
‘had been kept until that hour. 

He came not like John the Baptist, neither eat- 
Ing nor drinking in an ordinary way but living 
apart in the desert on locusts and wild honey in 
an unnatural, ascetic fashion. He came eating 
and drinking oftentimes with publicans and sin- 
ners. His table talk changed the lives of hard- 
headed business men like Zaccheus and Matthew. 
He was just as much at home with poor men like 
that beggar in Jerusalem who was born blind. 
While He was with them it never occurred to them 
that they were poor. In His presence all hands 
felt that no man’s life consists of the abundance 
of the things that he can buy. Life is made up 
of certain qualities of mind and heart and not of 
the things which men store up in barns or in 
banks. 

He told His friends that being good was being 
like the birds and the flowers. “Consider the 
ravens,” He said, “they neither sow nor reap. 
They have neither storehouse nor barn, yet God 
feeds them.” The ravens were not made to sow 


45 


Yale Talks 


and reap. They do the things they were made to 
do. They are true to the law of their being. They 
function according to their own natures. They 
live out their ravenhood flying to and fro, keen 
of eye and swift of wing, seeking their meat from 
God, and in the great natural order which enfolds 
them they are fed. 

“Consider the lilies,” He said, “they neither toil 
nor spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was never 
so well dressed as one of these wild flowers.” The 
lilies were not made to toil and spin. They do 
the things they were made to do. They are true 
to the law of their being. They function accord- 
ing to their own natures. They live out their lily- 
hood reaching down and claiming all that the soil 
has for them, looking up to receive all that the 
sun and the rain and the dew have for them, and 
so they are clothed with beauty. 

“Do that,” Jesus said. Do the things you were 
made to do. Be true to the law of your being. 
Function according to your own natures. Live 
out your manhood and your womanhood. What- 
soever your hands, your minds and your hearts 
find to do, do it well. Seek first the Kingdom of 
God and righteousness—that is what you were 
made to do. And when you are striving for self- 
realization along the line of the Divine Purpose 
for you, intelligently and conscientiously, you, too, 
will be fed and clothed. You will be fed indeed 
with the Bread that comes down from above and 


46 


I1I—Lure of Goodness 


clothed with that righteousness which is the fine 
linen of the saints. The Master was always sim- 
ple and natural in His method of being good. And 
that was one reason why men found Him interest- 
ing. 

In the second place, His goodness was abso- 
lutely spontaneous. He lived at a time when the 
good people of the world were keen on rules and 
regulations. They had reduced righteousness to a- 
science, as they believed, and it took a well-posted 
man to remember all the moves in the game as the 
Pharisees played it. There were thirty-three dif- 
ferent ways in which men could break the Sab- 
bath. There were fifty-seven varieties of mint, 
anise and cummin, which had to be carefully 
tithed. They had bound upon the consciences of 
men burdens grievous to be borne by their insist- 
ence upon endless details in the art of being good. 
Religion had become legalism; righteousness was 
an affair of rules. And the whole system had be- 
come as dull as a page torn out of a trigonometry. 

Jesus set Himself against that whole method. 
“Except your righteousness exceeds the righteous- 
ness of the scribes and Pharisees, except your 
goodness becomes more interesting and vital than 
that, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” 
A good tree brings forth good fruit naturally, 
spontaneously, inevitably. It cannot otherwise. 
It does it just as a bird sings. Therefore, make 
the tree good and let the fruit come as it will— 


47 


Yale Talks 


the fruit will be all right. A good man out of the 
good treasure of his heart brings forth good deeds. 
He does it naturally, spontaneously, inevitably. 
Therefore, make the heart right and let the con- 
duct come as it will. Love God with an honest 
heart, and love your neighbor as well as yourself, 
and then do as you please. With that sort of 
heart within, your own spontaneous action will be 
right. Love works no ill to anybody; therefore, 
love is the fulfilment of all law. 

Now that sort of goodness is interesting and 
worth while. The rule-keeping sort is always dull 
and weak. The young man who is always think- 
ing when he should put his right foot forward and 
when his left never becomes easy and graceful 
as a dancer—he can hardly walk across the room 
without falling over the flowers in the carpet. 
The young woman who is always trying to remem- 
ber Rule 53 or Rule 97 in some “Guide to De-. 
portment” or “Book of Etiquette,” never becomes 
a lady. She is not gaining that spirit of thought- 
ful, kindly consideration for others which is the 
essence of all good breeding. The people whose 
eyes are forever on rules of conduct graven on 
tables of stone rather than upon the temper and 
disposition of the heart never become genuinely 
good. The Master was intent upon a mode of 
goodness which should be vital. 

When we read the story of the Master’s life it 
seems as if He went about thinking up new ways 

48 


I1I—Lure of Goodness 


of being good. He was always striking out on 
lines of His own. If we had not gone so far 
toward making Him a stained-glass window, or a 
cold white marble statue, or a narrative in a book 
which most men seldom read—if we could only 
see Him as He was, flesh and blood, warm, real, 
alive, our hearts would leap at the sight of His 
goodness, as did the hearts of those men in Gali- 
lee. They were accustomed to the cut-and-dried - 
style of goodness, but when they saw His method 
they cried out, “This of a truth is that prophet 
that should come.” ‘They saw in Him what the 
nations had been waiting for during all those 
centuries. He was simple and natural, genuine 
and spontaneous, and when that type of goodness 
is lifted up in any land it draws men to it. 

You have all read no doubt about the Bishop 
whose name was “Welcome.” His name fitted 
him—it grew out of him like his hair. Wherever 
he went he was just that, he was welcome. When 
he was first made a Bishop he found that the 
Bishop’s palace had in it sixty splendid rooms 
while the little town hospital across the street had 
only six. He visited the hospital first. “How 
many patients have you here?” he said to the 
head physician. “Twenty-six.” ‘Your beds are 
crowded and your rooms are poorly ventilated.” 
“Yes, your lordship,” replied the doctor, “but 
what can we do—we have no more room.” “There 
is some mistake here,” said the Bishop; “they 


49 


Yale Talks © 


have gotten these houses mixed up. It is per- 
fectly clear to me that you have my house and I 
have yours. Restore me my own—your place is 
across the street.” So he had the sick people all 
moved over into the Bishop’s palace with its sixty 
rooms and he lived for the rest of his days in the 
little one-story hospital. That interested the 
people of the Diocese—they had never seen it on 
that fashion before. 

It was said of him that as long as he had money 
in his pockets he visited the poor people of his 
Diocese that he might help them. When his 
money was all gone he visited the rich to ask 
them for gifts to help the poor. 

He announced one Sunday that the following 
week he intended to go up into the mountains to 
visit some poor shepherds who were keeping their 
flocks in an out-of-the-way place. The mountains 
at that time were infested with brigands. 

The Mayor of the town called on him that 
afternoon to protest against his going. “You 
would need an escort of soldiers,” the Mayor said, 
“and even then you would imperil their lives as 
well as your own.” 

“For that reason,” the Bishop said, “I shall 
go without an escort.” : 

“Alone?” 

“Alone.” 

“They will rob you.” 

“TI have nothing.” 


50 


III—Lure of Goodness 

“They will kill you.” 

“A harmless old priest passing along muttering 
his prayers? What good would that do them?” 

“What would you do if you met them?” 

“T would ask them for alms for my poor.” 

The Mayor saw that he could not do anything 
with such a man—he, too, had never seen it on 
that fashion. The Bishop set out the next morn- 
ing with one small boy who had offered to go’ 
along to show him the way. He found the shep- 
herds and spent the week with them, telling them 
about the goodness of God and administering to 
them the Holy Communion, which they had not 
received for years. And when he returned he 
brought with him a large treasure of gold, silver 
and precious stones which had been sent to him 
there in the mountains with this message pinned 
upon it—‘‘To Bishop Welcome from Cravatte.” 

Cravatte was the ringleader of the brigands! 
And when the Bishop was showing his treasure to 
his curate he said, “To those who are satisfied with 
little, God sends much.” “God,” the curate re- 
plied, “or the devil?” The Bishop looked at him 
long and searchingly and answered, “God.” 

Now that is interesting! Bishop Welcome was 
like his Master. His life was the light of men. 
Wherever he went they saw their way about, and 
in that light they walked toward Heaven. His 
goodness was not the rule-keeping sort. It was 
simple and natural, genuine and spontaneous. It 


SI 


Yale Talks 


was the real thing, and when men saw it they 
glorified God. 

What a tragedy it is where goodness is carica- 
tured! Where it is made to seem dull and mean! 
Where men are honest because honesty is the best 
policy rather than from any real love of integrity! 
Where men are clean because they dread the con- 
sequences of doing what they would really like to 
do! Where they tell the truth because they are 
afraid of being found out as liars! Where they 
do an occasional good deed because it is pleasant 
to receive the applause of men! Where men cari- 
cature goodness in that way they become the 
enemies of the race. They are guilty of high 
crimes and misdemeanors against the Kingdom of 
God. They ought to be shut up somewhere until 
they learn better. 

And those people whose goodness is thin, 
meagre and commonplace with never a splendid 
outburst of real generosity in it, with none of that 
moral venture which leads men to stake every- 
thing on loyalty to principle, with none of that 
uncalculating devotion to an ideal which makes 
a life winsome—how all this becomes a hindrance 
in the path of goodness! And worse than all, 
those would-be superior persons who go about 
thinking about how much better they are than 
anybody else, the moral prigs and spiritual snobs 
who stand up and thank God that they are not 
as other men are! How they injure the cause of 


52 


I1I1—Lure of Goodness 


goodness! They make us feel like saying some- 
thing wicked. 

But goodness seen as it is, goodness where it is 
simple and natural, genuine and spontaneous, 
goodness as it burned with a steady flame in the 
life of Bishop Welcome and shone resplendent in 
the life of Jesus of Nazareth—goodness like that 
is the most interesting and winsome thing on 
earth. It is the wine of life. It is the poetry of 
human existence. It is human action set to music 
and singing the same tune the morning stars sang 
together in that high hour when all the sons of 
God shouted for joy. 

Now what can we do about it, you and I? 
What can we do to help to restore goodness to its. 
rightful place of honor and of interest? I know 
of nothing better than to undertake to show the 
world some of our very own. The best service 
anyone can render to the cause of music is not to 
go about arguing until he is red in the face, trying 
to convince people that Beethoven and Wagner, 
Schubert and Brahms, were great composers. 
That does not accomplish anything. The best 
service he can render to the cause of music is to 
learn to play a little of it or to sing a little of it 
in such a way that people hear and feel the power 
and beauty of real music. Do it. Do it yourself. 
It is the only way. 

The same principle applies to this more im- 
portant interest of goodness. We cannot all learn 


53 


Yale Talks 


to play, we cannot all learn to sing. We could not, 
if we chose, render the Fifth Symphony or the 
Overture to Tannhauser in such fashion that 
the hearts of all who heard would be hushed and 
awed. 

But we can learn to live, and being good is 
just that—it is living. It is living out one’s real 
self and not some unworthy caricature. It is 
living out one’s best self and not some poor third- 
rate substitute. “This do,” the Master said, “and 
thou shalt live.” The other mode of life is dying 
by inches or by yards, as the case may be. What 
those young men saw in the big city was not 
“life,” it was death. “I am come that you may 
have life and have it more abundantly.” When 
by the grace of God you are making your own 
life simple and natural, genuine and spontaneous 
in its goodness, you will enter into life to go no 
more out. And when you lift up that sort of 
goodness it will draw men to- you and it will draw 
them to Him. 


54 


IV 
How Old Are You? 


HEN Jacob learned that his son Joseph 
was still alive he went down to Egypt to 
visit him. While he was there, Joseph as a mark 
of respect to his father had him presented at 
court. And when the old patriarch stood before 
Pharaoh, ruler of the land of Egypt, the king said 
to him courteously, “How old art thou?” Jacob 
answered, “The years of my pilgrimage have been 
one hundred and thirty, and they have not yet 
attained unto the years of my fathers in the days 
of their pilgrimage.” It was a gracious answer. 
It was a polite way of telling Pharaoh that he did 
not feel like an old man at all, even though he 
had lived a hundred and thirty years and that he 
thought he might be good for some years to come. 
Let me ask you that question—How old are 
you? It is a personal sort of question. If I 
should go about pressing it upon people indi- 
vidually I might not meet with a very hearty 
response. Men as well as women show some re- 
luctance about giving the exact figures, especially 
when the gray hair has begun to show above their 
ears. 


55 


Yale Talks 


But I am not asking how long ago you were 
born—that would touch only the surface of my 
question. How much have you lived?—that is 
the real point of my inquiry! You cannot tell 
how much a man has lived by looking in the 
family Bible where the births of the children are 
recorded. Life is not measured solely by years. 
You must look at what you find written in the 
man himself. How much have you seen and heard 
and felt? How much have you loved and aspired 
and achieved in the depths of your own soul? 
How much actual experience of a worthy sort 
Stands recorded opposite your name where the 
angels of God are writing all the time? Measure 
your life in that more intelligent way and tell me 
what you find! 

The moment you undertake this more accurate 
appraisement you discover that life has various 
dimensions. It has length—that we all know and 
the length of a man’s life can be easily stated in 
years and months and days, as in a funeral notice. 
But life may also have breadth and height and 
depth. However it may be in mathematics, there 
is a fourth dimension in human experience, and 
we must bear all these dimensions in mind when 
we undertake to ascertain how much anyone has 
lived or is likely to live in those years that lie 
ahead. 


Let me speak first of the eng of life, It is 
not the most important of the four dimensions, 


56 


TV—How Old Are You? 


but it is not to be lightly regarded. A man must 
have some length of days, to achieve anything of 
value. The little child that is born today and 
dies tomorrow does not accomplish anything—it 
had no time to show its capacity for living. It 
was only a bud on the tree of life, which never 
opened into a fragrant blossom, to say nothing of 
reaching the stage of ripened fruit. It is im- 
possible to do a day’s work in ten minutes or a 
life-work in ten years. 

And how many long-lived men have done their 
best work when they were past sixty—some of 
them when they were past seventy! Gladstone 
became Prime Minister of the British Empire 
three times after he was sixty years of age. He 
added immensely to his fame and to his useful- 
ness by the ripened service of those later years. 
William Cullen Bryant wrote his famous transla- 
tion of the Iliad when he was almost eighty. John 
Wesley, founder of the largest Protestant denomi- 
nation in the English-speaking world, lived to be 
nearly ninety, preaching, writing, traveling, or- 
ganizing, until within a few weeks of his death; 
and some of his best work was done in his old age. 
Lyman Abbott and Washington Gladden in those 
years which lie in the vicinity of eighty, were 
preaching with great acceptance to college stu- 
dents and writing leaders for the papers to influ- 
ence the thinking of their fellow men, and pointing 
the way of social and spiritual advance for the 


57 


Yale Talks 


nation. “With long life will I satisfy Him and 
show Him my salvation”—this was the promise 
made of old to the man who dwelt in the secret 
place of the Most High. The wise man plans for 
length of days that with ripened powers he may 
still bring forth fruit in his old age. 

We may say all this heartily, yet the length of 
a man’s life is only a secondary consideration. 
The long life is not necessarily an interesting or a 
useful one. There was Methuselah! The modern 
scholars tell us that the names of those long-lived 
old fellows in the Book of Genesis were probably 
the names of tribes rather than of individuals. 
However that may be, Methuselah will serve as 
an illustration. Here is the record of his career 
as it stands in Holy Writ,—‘“And Methuselah 


begat sons and daughters and he lived nine hun- 


dred and sixty-nine years and he died.” 

That is all that is said about him—apparently 
that is all there was to say. His life was a life 
of one dimension; namely, length. “He lived nine 
hundred and sixty-nine years and he died”—a 
long, narrow, uneventful, uninteresting life! No 
breadth of interest worth recording; no depth of 
conviction to be noted; no height of aspiration to 
place another worthy ideal in the sky of human 
desire! Nothing but length—nine hundred and 
sixty-nine years! 

Suppose he did outlive all his contemporaries! 
Suppose he lived longer than any other man in 

58 


1V—How Old Are You? 


history! Suppose he had lived to this hour— 
what of it! If he accomplished nothing worthy of 
being recorded save the fact that he had a family 
and lived a long time, then the full measure of 
years allotted him would only add to his disgrace. 

How long did Jesus Christ live when He was 
here on earth? Not long, speaking after the 
manner of men. He was only thirty-three when 
they put Him to death on the cross. Methuselah 
lived thirty times as long. But how much did 
Christ live in that brief time? 

He spent thirty of those years in mental pre- 
paration and spiritual discipline. No wonder the 
three years of which we know so much were great 
when we think of those thirty silent years of which 
we know so little standing behind them! Ten 
years of preparation for one of public service! 
Ten days of thought and prayer for one day of 
healing, redemptive action! Ten hours of silence 
for one of speech! How much He packed into 
those fleeting years of ministry to human need and 
of contribution to the cause of human betterment! 
How mighty those three years were in their holy 
and permanent influence upon the life of the race! 
His life was short but it was great. When men 
speak of Him they do not ask, “How long did He 
live?” but “How much.” “In Him was life,” life 
in all its dimensions and to this hour that life is 
the light of men. The length of any life is the 
least important fact about it. 


59 


Yale Talks 


ye When we come to the breadth of life how wide 


is that man you have in mind? We cannot tell by 
the use of a tape line. He may not be as broad as 
a barn door, yet he may serve. If he is a true 
man he has a certain breadth which must be 
measured in more vital fashion. What is the 
range of his interests? How far afield do his 
sympathies go? How many points of contact has 
he with the life of his city, his state, his nation? 
How broadly does he think when he reckons up 
the forces that make for or against human well- 
being? How many different forms of stimulus 
cause him to react? 

Here is a man who prides himself on being a 
specialist. He emulates the spirit of that German 
scholar, who having given his entire attention to 
Greek nouns regretted on his death-bed that he 
had not specialized more strictly by devoting his 
whole life to the study of the dative case. This 
man I have in mind is ignorant of pretty much 
everything outside his own particular field. In 
that field of interest he is as bright and as sharp 
as a cambric needle, and as narrow. His eye will 
not hold anything larger than the fine thread of 
his own specialty. He has no taste for music— 
Beethoven and Wagner simply bore him; he cares 
no more for the Fifth Symphony or for the Over- 
ture to Tannhauser than he does for a last year’s 
bird’s nest. He does not care for pictures—‘‘Why 
should I tramp wearily through long galleries 

60 


IV—How Old Are Your 

wearing out my legs and my eyes,” he says, 
“merely to look at a lot of old saints and Madonnas 
and angels?” He is not interested in philosophy 
—Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Eucken 
and Bergson are to him simply “dull old chaps 
who never got their feet on the ground.” He has 
no use for religion—to him “‘it is all up in the air,” 
vague, uncertain, mysterious. He has narrowed 
his life to a single line of interest, losing out of it- 
the fine quality of breadth. 

Here is another type, the prosperous, self-made, 
self-satisfied man! He trots along the narrow 
tow-path of his own material success as if he had 
the universe at his feet. He thinks that a man’s 
life does consist in the abundance of the things 
that he owns, a certain eminent authority to the 
contrary notwithstanding. He has never allowed 
his interest to be deflected from his own success 
by any sympathetic feeling for others. He says, 
“Charity begins at home,” thereby excusing him- 
self from any participation in the benevolent 
activities of the day. His charity begins at home 
and ends there in its own dooryard. He has 
fenced up his path until it is a narrow, meagre 
runway. If he were a man of any size he would 
be unable to squeeze through. He is more to be 
pitied than poor Methuselah for his own life 
lacks breadth and he will not be allowed anything 
like nine hundred and sixty-nine years of it. 

How far those men are from the Kingdom of 

61 


Yale Talks 


God! How far they are from the method of 
Jesus! His life was broad in its sympathies, wide 
in the range of its interest. He could sit at meat 
with Zaccheus, a rich man who had been dis- 
honest and miserly, until the man of means was 
moved to say, “Half of my goods I give to the 
poor, and if I have taken anything from any man 
wrongfully I restore him fourfold.” He could 
talk with the poor beggar who was born blind 
until his eyes were opened and the man was say- 
ing, “Once I was blind. Now I see.” He could 
talk with Nicodemus, a master in Israel, until 
the man of culture was born anew. He could talk 
with those fishermen in Galilee until they said, 
“We never heard it on this fashion before.” 
Jesus was an all-round man, the Perfect, the 
Typal, the Representative Man. He was the Son 
of Man, the heir of all that is splendidly and eter- 
nally human. He said to His friends, “Love your 
neighbors as I have loved you.” Love the man 
next to you. Love the man who needs you. Love 
the man on the Jericho road, who has been beaten 
and robbed—help him along to a place of safety 
and renewal. Let your sympathies leap over the 
barriers of race, of religious belief, and of social 
class until you feel your kinship with all hands. 
Break down the walls which shut you off from 
those other fields of thought and action where 
your brother men are finding so much to enjoy. 
Brush away the silly social conventions which 
62 


ere . <a 


1V—How Old Are Your 


shut you up to an exclusive interest in your own 
set—all men and women are much alike when we 
get the feathers off of them! Form the habit of 
getting the other man’s point of view—not always 
to adopt it, but to understand it. 

If you are an employer make it your business 
to, know what the labor unions and the socialists 
are talking about, that you may see the problem 
of industry from their angle of vision. If you. 
are a wage earner seek to understand what diffi- 
culties the man who is a manufacturer or a mer- 
chant must face in the development and main- 
tenance of a business which offers employment to 
hundreds of people incapable of organizing such 
a business themselves. This will make you a 
bigger, a broader, and a better man. You can 
look more intelligently upon your own things when 
you have learned to look also on the things of 
others. 

You may be familiar with the doctrine of rein- 
carnation as it is taught in some of the ethnic 
religions. They hold that when a man has fin- 
ished his earthly course he may come back after 
death and be born again in this world in some 
other form. If he was rich when he was here, he 
‘may come back a poor man. If he had a fine 
social position, he may come back as a tramp. If 
he was an ignorant man working with his hands, 
he may come back as a college president. Ii he 
was an invalid or a cripple, he may come back 

63 


Yale Talks 


with abounding physical vigor that he may know 
the joys and the temptations of that mode of life. 
By a whole series of reincarnations, twenty of 
them perhaps, he will at last attain to a fully 
rounded human experience. He will have taken all 
the courses, required and elective, in the big uni- 
versity of experience where the college colors are 
black and blue because the lessons are learned by 
hard knocks. 

It is a fanciful idea,—we have no evidence that 
we were ever here on earth before or that we shall 
be here again. But it suggests a feeling that 
everyone has had. Every true man has wished 
that he might enter more thoroughly and more 
sympathetically into the lives of his fellows, 
especially the less fortunate ones. Messmates 
they are at the board of life, yet how little he 
knows of the inner motives, the longings, and 
yearnings of many of them! 

I have wished many a time that I could leave 
my pulpit and go out and be a teamster or a street- 
car conductor for six months. I am sure I would 
come back better able to preach the Gospel of 
the Son of man to those men in the language in 
which they were born. I did belong for six 
years to the Central Labor Council in my city 
made up of representatives from the various labor 
unions. I represented the “Ministers Union” and 
I had a voice and a vote along with the carpenters, 
bricklayers, stone masons, the printers, plumbers, 


64 


I1V—How Old Are You? 


the painters and all the rest. It broadened me out 
until at the end of those six years I felt that an 
ell had been built on each side of my nature to 
accommodate the fresh supply of sympathetic 
interest. 

Abraham Lincoln was only one man among the 
_ millions of men in this country in his day. From 
' the hour when he was born in that log cabin in 


the State of Kentucky until the day he entered - 


the White House, he was compelled to follow a 
somewhat narrow path. But when he really 
faced his life-work he was able to enter so sym- 
pathetically into the feelings of others, northern 
men and southern men, white men and black men, 
men who wanted “States Rights” and men who 
believed in the integrity of the Union, men who 
were for “peace at any price” and men who faced 
the stern necessity of Civil War—he entered so 
sympathetically into their feelings that it seemed 
as if the whole American people lived and moved 
and had its being in the heart of that greatest 
American. “With malice toward none, with 
charity for all, with firmness in the right as God 
gave him to see the right,” he gathered up all these 
interests into the arms of his effort to the end that 
“government of the people, by the people and for 
the people should not perish from the earth.” His 
life was not long—the assassin’s bullet cut it short 
—but it was exceedingly broad. 


In the parable of the sower some seed fell by }. 


65 


ee el 


Yale Talks 


the wayside where the ground was hard and it 
failed to grow. Some fell among thorns where 
the soil was overgrown with noxious weeds and 
it became unfruitful. Some fell where there was 
no depth of earth and because the soil was thin 
it withered away. 

The sorry fate of this last bit of seed represents 
the failure of those lives which are shallow, super- 
ficial, all on the surface. They receive good im- 
pressions readily, and just as readily let them go. 
They live by custom, usage and the easy con- 
ventions of those who surround them. When 
they are in Rome they do as the Romans do. 
When they are in New York they do as Broadway 
does, even though that may mean a much less 
wholesome type of life than the one they put up in 
their own home towns. They rise or fall with easy 
unconcern to the moral level of those with whom 
they find themselves. 

Their lives are thin. They have no depth of 
conviction rooting down into that which is vital 
and fundamental. They have no deep, under- 
lying purposes and principles of action. They 
have no deep, sweet wells of feeling on which they 
may draw for wholesome impulse. 

Off the coast of Labrador I have seen huge 
icebergs towering up three or four hundred feet 
in the air. I have seen them sailing due south in 
the teeth of a strong head wind. The gale was 
blowing from the south thirty, forty, fifty miles 

66 





TV—How Old Are You? 


an hour, yet those icebergs sailed on toward the 
south without ever tacking. They had neither 
sails nor rudder by which they could tack. The 
secret of it lay in the fact that seven-eighths of 
the bulk of an iceberg is under water. The great 
Labrador current makes strongly toward the 
south. It gripped the huge bulk of those icebergs 
and bore them along no matter how the wind 

might blow at the surface. 

Here is a life which is able to say what Jesus 
said, “I come not to do my own will but the will 
of Him who sent me.” The man has a sense of 
mission, of purpose, of deep underlying agree- 
ment with the will of God. The whole venture 
and process of his activities are embedded in a 
moral order. They lie secure in the will and pur- 
pose of the Almighty. The man has the power 
which comes from depth. 

You will sometimes hear it said of a man—and 
it is high praise—“He is always the same.” He 
may be traveling the high road of prosperity with 
flags flying and bands playing, or he may be 
walking through the Valley of the Shadow of 
Defeat. He may be standing in the presence of 
the rich or he may be in the humbler homes of the 
poor. He may find himself in an atmosphere 
charged with religious aspiration or he may be 
in the company of scoffers. He is never turned 
aside nor thrown down nor beaten back by any 
of these varying situations. He is always just the 

67 


Yale Talks 


same—a simple genuine God-fearing, man-loving 
soul. 

How does this man who is “always the same” 
maintain that fine poise and balance. His life 
has depth of purpose, of conviction, of feeling. 
He draws his supplies from the lower levels of his 
being where a man’s real life may be hid with 
Christ in God. He has the serene strength which 
comes from depth of life. 

The eign of a man’s life is not indicated by his 
present achievements. You cannot determine how 
tall he is by standing him against the door and 
measuring the deeds he has done or the actual 
attainments he has made in personal character. 
It is not what you have done, it is what you want 
to do and mean to do that tells the story. It is 
not what you are at this moment, it is what you 
want to be and intend to be some day that marks 
you up or down on the books of the Recording 
Angel. 

I once heard a young Hindoo say in his broken 
English, “I am not what I ought to be. I am not 
what I want to be. But by the grace of God I am 
not what I was and I mean to be like Him.” 
There you have it! The real height of every 
man’s life must be measured by the upward, out- 
ward, Godward reach of his own aspiration and 
resolve. 

Here is a man in the slums! He bears the 
marks of moral failure written all over him. He 

68 





1V—How Old Are You? 


is stained by the coarse sins of the flesh. He has 
lied until his tongue is twisted; he has been dis- 
honest so many times that his hand is like a claw. 
His mind is a cage of unclean beasts and his 
heart is a den for creeping things. 

“How tall is that man, morally speaking?” you 
ask. I do not know. I cannot tell until I know 
what he means to do with himself. If he is 
actually saying in his heart what a certain moral 
failure once said in a far country, he may be 
towering up like a sequoia tree. If he is willing 
to confess his sins with no whimpering excuses; 
if he will stand out in the open saying, “I have 
sinned against Heaven and before men; I am no 
more worthy to be called a man; but I will arise 
and go to my Father,” and if he is ready to stand 
up and go, putting evil behind him and putting 
his trust in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, then I find in him an earnest and a promise 
of future growth which give his life the dignity 
and the height of spiritual worth. Measure every 
man not by his present achievements but by the 
upward, outward reach of his aspiration and 
resolve. 

Give me your answer then before we go! How 
much have you lived—and what is more to the 
purpose, how much are you planning to live in 
those years which lie ahead? What are the 
measurements according to which you are laying 
out that spiritual edifice, that building of God, 


69 


site . 


Yale Talks 


that house not made with hands, eternal in the 
realm of moral values? a: 
Bring your materials and lay them on that 
foundation which has stood the test, for other 
foundation can no man lay than that which is laid 
in Jesus Christ. Have in mind these four dimen- 
sions when you undertake to build. Live so that 
length of days may be yours if it please God— 
then you will not drop your task half finished. © 
Open your heart on all sides to the needs and 
appeals of your fellow men, that your life may 
have the breadth which comes from a wide range 
of sympathetic interest. Have that depth of con- 
viction and purpose which means stability. - Then 
let your hopes reach out among the stars as you 
strive to wear at last the likeness and image of the 
Son.of God. Live in that mood and after that 
method, that you may have life abundant, life 


- eternal, life which is life indeed! 


70 





V 
The Power of a Resolute Minority 
4 7HEN the Israelites had escaped from 


Egypt and had reached the borders of the - 


Promised Land they sent twelve men ahead to 
reconnoiter. These spies were to bring back a 
report upon the land the Israelites were sent to 
conquer. When they returned ten of them said 
that it could not be done, the difficulties in the 
way were too great. They counseled a retreat. 

But the other two brought in a minority report. 
They believed that a splendid victory could be 
won by an immediate advance along the whole 
line. It was two against ten, but it turned out 
that the two had the right of it. Their judgment 
prevailed and the Israelites went in to conquer 
that country which they held and ruled for fifteen 
centuries. And when the victory was won the 
two men had the joy of knowing that their influ- 
ence had turned the scale. It suggests the power 
of a resolute minority. 

The twelve men all saw the same set of facts. 
This is the way their commission read, ‘See the 
land what it is, whether fat or lean, open or 
wooded. See the people that dwell therein, 


71I 


Yale Talks 


whether they be few or many, strong or weak, 
dwelling in tents or dwelling in walled cities.” 
“Get the facts,” Moses said, ‘and bring them to 
me.” | 

The twelve men all traveled together. They 
saw the same hills and crossed the same valleys. 
They saw the same walled cities and the same 
roving Bedouins in their black tents. They saw 
the same resources of the country stretching away 
on every side and the same obstacles to be over- 
come. It was identically the same situation which 
met the gaze of all those men. 

Herein their experience is a leaf from the book 
of life. The world we live in, taking it by and 
large, is the same gigantic fact for all hands. The 
physical order which confronts you and me and 
him is the same big, solid fact for us all. The 
moral order which enfolds us, whether we like it 
or not, making the way of the transgressor hard 
and the way of the righteous the way of peace and 
honor, is the same unyielding fact for us all. The 
great God who looks down upon us whether we 
look up at Him or not is the same Almighty Fact 
for all hands. And we are sent out, as were the — 
spies, into this complexity of facts and forces to 
make report upon what we find and to order our 
lives according to that finding. 

It is altogether right that it should be so. “I 
go the way of all the earth,”’ Joshua said. He 
took the middle of the road and accepted his full 


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V—A Resolute Minority 


share of the common lot. It was the only way he 
could become the leader and servant of his day 
and generation. ‘He was tempted in all points 
like as we are,” was said of a greater than Joshua. 
He also tasted the human situation, death in- 
cluded, for every man. In that way He became 
indeed the Typal, the Representative, the Perfect 
Man, the Son of man, able also to be the Savior 
of men. The only men who can “draw the thing” 
as they see it for the God of things as they are” 
will be found to be the men who travel the main 
road and face the needs which belong to human 
experience in the large. The twelve men in this 
story were faced by the same set of facts and 
forces challenging them to do their best. 

Ten of the twelve failed to see things in their 
right perspective. Here is the report they made! 
“It is a good land, an exceedingly good land. It 
is a land that flows with milk and honey. This is 
the fruit of it”—and they pointed to a cluster of 
grapes so large that to avoid crushing it they had 
carried it on a staff between two men. “But the 
people are strong, the children of Anak, the 
giants are there—we were like grasshoppers in 
their sight; and their cities are walled up to 
Heaven.” 

These men were scared, and when men are 
scared their souls shrivel up until they feel no 
larger than grasshoppers. They were moral 
cowards and when a coward looks at the difficul- 


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Yale Talks 


ties in the way they seem to reach up to the very 
clouds of Heaven. So the ten men brought in an 
evil report of the land. 

How true to life it allis!] Every man gets as he 
brings. He sees in any situation what he has eyes 
to see. It is not so much a question of eyesight 
as of insight. It-is the mind that sees and not the 
eyes alone. And the reaction which any set of 
facts produces upon any man is determined in 
great measure by his own powers of perception 
and appreciation. 

Here were ten men who saw nothing except that 
which lay at the surface, and when they made 
their report they were all astray! When they 
added up their columns of figures they gave full 
place to the sons of Anak and the walled cities, 
but they left out of the account the might of moral 
purpose and the aid of the Almighty. That ren- 
dered their trial balance misleading. They had 
not eyes to see, nor minds to understand, nor 
hearts to feel the force of certain finer and more 
subtle forms of energy which were at work that 
day in the Land of Promise. 

How many people there are who allow them- 
selves to be driven off the field by purely material 
considerations! They see the Canaanites and 
the city walls, but nothing else. You will hear 
them pitying themselves as the victims of circum- 
stances. ‘We are what we are by the operation 
of certain forces which we cannot control. 


74 





V—A Resolute Minority 


Therefore, it would be better for us to have died 
in the land of Egypt where we were sure of our 
flesh pots.” And the men who take this view of 
life go about with their hearts in their boots, feel- 
ing that they are no better than so many grass- 
hoppers. 

How many men are frightened out of their 
principles by some thoughtless majority! “Here 
is a situation,” they say, “where it is ten to two, 
five to one, against the mode of life to which we 
were brought up.” It must be that the ten have 
the right of it. It would be foolhardy to fly in the 
face of such a majority. They seem to forget 
that moral questions are never settled by a show 
of hands. They forget that you cannot state the 
real significance of many a situation in figures. 
The truth oftentimes is a matter of emphasis, of 
perspective, of atmosphere, and this cannot be 
conveyed in a column of figures. And mere sta- 
' tistics can be made to lie, like other things. If 
figures always dropped dead when they uttered 
falsehoods as Ananias and Sapphira did, the ten 
digits would have been buried long ago. There 
are any number of truths in human life which 
cannot be set down in rows of figures. 

The men are foolish indeed who allow them- 
selves to be crushed by the mere weight of num- 
bers. The timid politician is afraid of a mob 
because it is big and can howl—he is more afraid 
of the mob than of his own conscience. The man 


75 


Yale Talks 


in public life is more afraid of some yellow journal 
which claims the largest circulation and yells in 
headlines than of the verdict of those people of 
intelligence and character whose estimates really 
matter. The college man may be scared out of 
his own finer mode of life by some thoughtless 
bunch which indulges in coarse talk, loose con- 
duct, and low intellectual standards. He is 
actually afraid to allow his own best self to stand 
out clear and firm. The boy in preparatory school 
may find himself in a group where it is ten to two 
against those principles to which he is most in- 
clined. Thus numbers make cowards of us all and 
the pale cast of resolution is sicklied o’er by an 
array of figures. 

“I was afraid,” the man in the parable said, the 
man who had received but one talent. “I was 
afraid and I went and hid.” If he had received 
ten talents and had been the most gifted man in 
the community, he seemed to think that he might 
not have crawled under the bed when the time 
came for him to show his colors; but because he 
was just an ordinary, everyday man with one 
fairly good-sized talent he had not the necessary 
moral fibre to be what he was and to do what he 
could do. “I was afraid and I went and hid”— 
and thus he lost his talent and his soul. 

There are a few people in the world who are 
hypocrites because they are trying to appear 
better than they really are. There are not many 

76 





V—A Resolute Minority 


of them—there are scarcely enough of them to 
leave what the chemist would call “a trace.” But 
there are many weak-kneed souls who are guilty 
of moral insincerity in not being willing to appear 
as good as they really are. The boy of sixteen is 
so afraid of being regarded as a moral prig that 
he leans over backward and does not appear to be 
as straight as he really is. The young man at 
college would sometimes rather be put down as . 
fast or loose in his morals than to be known for 
the clean, fine, serious qualities of mind and heart 
which are truly his. In all such cases they are 
hypocrites, and I have the feeling that the man 
who is unwilling to be known for the best that is 
in him does more harm than the man who is trying 
to appear better than he really is. 

The moral courage of that minority finally 
carried the day. It was not accomplished without 
struggle—the two men had a hard fight on their 
hands. When the ten made their discouraging 
report the foolish Israelites sat down and wept. 
“They cried all night,” the record says. “Would 
God we had died in Egypt! Would God we had 
died in the wilderness!” Would God anything 
had happened to us rather than that we be com- 
pelled to face these difficulties! 

And ere long those moral cowards were all 
dead. They were killed off by the divine con- 
tempt. They were too anemic to get through the 
winter. “It came to pass that the men who 


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brought the evil report of the land died by the 
plague before the Lord, but Caleb and Joshua 
lived.” The two men who made up the resolute 
minority lived on to fight their way through to a 
splendid success and to enjoy their full share of 
the Land of Promise. 

Here is the report they made! “The land is an 
exceedingly good land, it flows with milk and 
honey. It is a land where one may eat bread 
without scarceness and not lack any good thing, 
and we are abundantly able to go up and possess 
it. If the Lord delight in us because of the pur- 
pose we cherish and the spirit we show, He will 
give us the land. Let us go up at once and possess 
it.” They, too, had seen the giants, the sons of 
Anak, but even so they were not ready to put 
themselves in the grasshopper class. They, too, 
had seen the walled cities, but those mighty de- 
fenses in their eyes did not reach quite up to 
Heaven. In the face of everything they were 
ready to make an advance. | 

They formed a sounder judgment of the situa- 
tion because they saw more. They saw everything 
between the ground and the stars, things material 
and things spiritual. They saw that it was not a 
mere squabble between a few self-seeking Jews on 
the one hand and a few tribes of corrupt Ca- 
naanites on the other. It was the attempt to 
secure a footing for that Hebrew nation which was 
destined in its unfolding life to take the right of 

78 


V—A Resolute Minority 


the line in spiritual leadership for centuries. 
What a history lay ahead of those resolute men 
who brought in the minority report! Our Bible 
was written by Hebrews. Our Savior was a 
Hebrew, born in Bethlehem of Judea. Great 
issues were at stake and those two men of insight 
recognized something of the moral significance of 
their action when they called for an immediate 
advance. 

It was no dare-devil spirit—they were men of 
faith. They believed in themselves and in their 
fellows and in God. They saw the red thread of 
moral purpose running through all human history. 
They saw the great divine intention underlying 
and overarching all our earthly activity. And 
there lies the difference between the ten who fail 
and the two who win out. The spirit of distrust 
causes men to shrivel up like grasshoppers while 
the spirit of faith makes them brave and strong. 
It was the spirit of faith which enabled Gideon 
and Barak, Moses and Samuel, David Livingstone 
and Abraham Lincoln, Lloyd George and Wood- 
row Wilson to work righteousness, subdue king- 
doms and put to flight the armies of evil. God 
be praised for men who believe something—they 
are the only men who count! 

Here were two men who were not whining 
about being the victims of circumstances! They 
had learned to stand erect with all their faculties 
at attention waiting for the word of command to 


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go ahead. They “looked upward not downward, 
outward not inward, forward not backward,” and 
were ready to lend a hand. They were masters 
of their fate, the captains of their souls. They 
faced the world undaunted. 


“One who never turn’d his back but march’d breast 
forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dream’d, though right were worsted, wrong 
would triumph, ) 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake.” 


Such men in the fifteenth century before Christ, 
or in the twentieth century after, in Palestine or 
in Connecticut, are destined through the aid of 
Him who rules the issue to win the day. 

Two men of the right sort in a store or an office 
can change the moral atmosphere and raise the 
tone of conversation to a higher level by allowing 
the best that is in them to stand revealed. Two 
men in a college class can change the spirit of 
that class by the fine quality of the principles they 
display and by the splendor of their ideals. Two 
boys in any group can put a new face on the whole 
situation by the genuineness of their own lives. 
The issue is decided by the power of the resolute 
minority faced right. 

The victory of this high-minded group is as- 
sured by their sense of agreement with the will of 

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V—A Resolute Minority 


God. “There is a divinity that shapes our ends” 
and when we are striving to shape them ourselves 
according to His wish, we have the sense of a great 
reinforcement. When we are working out any- 
thing worthy to be called salvation, God is work- 
ing within us to accomplish His good pleasure. 
When any man is rowing his boat toward the 
haven where God would have him arrive, he has 
the wind and the tide with him doubling his effec- 
tiveness in every stroke he makes. With the sense 
of that Almighty Aid pledged to his advantage 
any man can face an adverse majority without 
flinching. 

Here was Jesus Christ caring not a straw for 
the mere fact of numbers! He never gained a 
large following, even though He spake as never 
man spake. He chose twelve intimates and gave 
the best part of the last two years of His public 
ministry to training those men. He lived with 
them until they were saturated with His ideas 
and steeped in His spirit. They were branches 
of the true vine, projections of His own potent 
life. Then He stood up and pitted them against 
the full strength of pagan Rome. “Ye shall sit 
upon twelve thrones,” He said, in recognition of 
their powers of spiritual leadership. They never 
wore the purple nor had crowns on their heads, 
but they set in operation a process of spiritual 
renewal which was nothing less than regal. 

You will find any number of situations where 

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some hard task has to be done by a small number 
of men. There are difficult causes to be advanced. 
There are forlorn hopes worth fighting for to the 
end that they may become no more forlorn, but 
the earnest of coming victory. There are fellows 
made unpopular by some defect of manner or 
oddity in appearance but with splendid stuff in 
them, who need friends to aid them in realizing 
the promise of their lives. All the more honor to 
those who have eyes to see and are ready to put in 
their best strength to that end. 

You will recall that story of Sodom. The city 
had become so foul in its morals that the Judge of 
all the earth proposed to destroy it, lock, stock 
and barrel. But it was suggested that perhaps 
fifty righteous men might be found in it, and that 
they ought not to be destroyed with the guilty. 
The Lord said He would spare it if fifty good 
men could be found there. Then the petitioner, 
realizing that good men were scarce in Sodom, 
asked if the requirements might be reduced to 
forty, and then he suggested thirty, and then 
twenty, and finally he brought the figures down 
to ten. 

The Judge of all the earth intent upon doing 
right assured him that if even ten good mer: 
could be found in the place He would spare it 
for their sake. But even the ten good men were 
not forthcoming and so Sodom was wiped off the 
map by fire and brimstone. Ten righteous men 

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V—A Resolute Minority 


_ would have saved Sodom! Ten righteous men 
' placed at strategic points in the community will 
save any city. It suggests the tremendous sig- 
nificance of a resolute minority in active agree- 
ment with the Will of God. 

Where will you stand, then, with the thoughtless 
majority which may be showing the white feather 
of moral purpose, or with Caleb and Joshua, men 
possessed of courage and ready for the great 
advance? You may be facing at this moment the 
obligation to live a clear-cut, definite Christian 
life, but the odds against you, so far as numbers 
go, are ten to two. What of it! The very diffi- 
culty of the undertaking offers the more effective 
challenge to your best powers of mind and heart. 
, Why not stand with the saving remnant which is 
somewhere to be found in any community! Why 
not stand with the seven thousand moral reserves 
who have not bowed the knee to Baal, thereby 
becoming the hope of the nation! Why not link 
up your lives with Him who is able to bring us 
off from any field of effort more than conquerors! 
Then your way of life will be a steady advance 
into your appointed share of some splendid land 
of promise, 


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Vi 
Unconscious Influence 


4 Peete was a man named Peter in the Early 
Church who had come to be known as an 
upright, downright, outright sort of Christian. 
He had done so many good deeds, he had spoken 
_§0 many true and timely words, he was so simple, 
unaffected and genuine in his whole make-up that 
the people came to believe that his very shadow 
would do a man good. The humanity of the man 
was so warm and real that they invested 
it with a certain miraculous quality. “So they 
brought the sick people into the streets that at 
least Peter’s shadow might fall on them as he 
_ passed by.” 

~ We are not told that any sick people were 
actually healed in that way. The record does not 
say. It was expecting a good deal of a shadow. 
But the very fact that they did it was a splendid 
tribute to the quality of the man. They believed 
in him and they felt that something subtle, mag- 
netic, redemptive would emanate from him and 
reach those sufferers through his very shadow. It 
was their testimony to the silent, powerful con- 
tagion of a thoroughly good life. 


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V1I—Unconscious Influence 


It was a form of energy which was entirely 
personal. It had not been organized into any kind 
of an institution. It had not been delegated to 
any sort of committee. I wonder if Peter ever 
served on a committee. If he escaped all that in 
his busy life he was in luck. It was just a reflec- 
tion, a projection, so to speak, of Peter himself 
stretched out on the grass. It was broad with 
Peter’s breadth. If he had been built on narrow, 
meagre lines, it would have been narrow and 
meagre. It was tall or short, according to Peter’s 
own stature. It had in it all the lines and angles 
of Peter’s appearance as faithfully as the sun 
could reproduce them. To all intents and pur- 
poses it was Peter himself spread out on the 
ground where the sick people were lying. 

Now the most potent and lasting sort of influ- 
ence is just like that. It is not so much what you 
say; it is not so much what you do—it is what 
you are that does the business. It is what you 
are when you are not saying anything or doing 
anything. It is what you are when no one is 
looking or listening. It is a certain atmosphere 
which you create and carry with you which regis- 
ters its impress upon other lives for good or ill. 
It is a form of energy as silent and invisible as 
the power of gravitation—and in the realm of 
character building as mighty through God to the 
pulling down of the strongholds of evil. Every 
man develops and maintains that personal some- 

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Yale Talks 


thing which goes with him wherever he goes, 
laying its hand upon every life which comes within 
the length of his cable-tow. 

The highest thing we know on earth is human 
personality. It is there that the likeness and 
image of God emerge. When any man is richly 
endowed in mind and heart we say of him, “He 
has a strong personality.” “Have dominion,” 
God said at the start to the human factors in His 
creation. “Have dominion over the fish of the 
sea and the fowl of the air, over the cattle and the 
creeping things.” He knew that in every field 
of effort human personality would determine the 
issue. g 

Cesar, Luther, Cromwell, Lincoln, these men 
made history! They changed the course of — 
human events. They set the pace of progress. 
They gave shape and content to what had been 
without form and void. They did it by being 
what they were. By the vigor of their thought 
and by the strength of their wills, by the wide 
range of their interests and by the high quality of 
their principles they became creative. And that 
power of personality must be gained and held by 
each man for himself. It cannot be taught in a 
correspondence school, nor sent here or there by 
express. It is right there where the man is and 
nowhere else. Once gained it can be wielded for 
good or for ill, according to the moral purpose of 
the man, as the mightiest force in human affairs. 

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VI—Unconscious Influence 


- We are told that Napoleon in his best days — 
would, on the eve of every great battle, send for 
his marshals and have them come one by one to his 
own tent. There in silence he would clasp each 
man’s hand, look into his eyes for a moment and 
let him go. He had not uttered a word, but it 
was enough. Every man of them went out ready 
to do and to dare and to die, if need be, next day 
for Napoleon. His shadow had fallen upon them, 
healing them of any lurking remnant of cowardice 
or any lingering uncertainty touching the victory 
they were to win. They felt as if they were all 
Napoleons and that their stars were in the, 
ascendant. . 

In business and in politics, in the work of edu- 
cation and in the work of religion, it is person- 
ality that counts. And where a given personality 
is stimulating, wholesome, reliable, it gets results 
like those which the people of that early day were 
ready to ascribe to Peter’s shadow. 


The finest form of influence is also uncon- © 


scious. Peter was not passing down street that 
day for the sake of casting a shadow. He had 
not even noticed that his shadow was there. He 
was going straight along about his business on 
some errand of usefulness, and the shadow came 
of itself. That was the beauty of it in the eyes of 
those who believed in him. If he had been think- 
ing about it, if he had been saying to himself, 
“What a handsome shadow I am casting on the 
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Yale Talks 


lawn! What a wonderful man I must be to have 
them carry out the sick and lay them along my 
path,” they would not have done it. 

People never lay their needs along the path of 
a self-conscious prig as he struts along. The man 
who poses as if he were forever having his picture 
taken will have his shadow all to himselfi—no one 
will want it. And those silly, affected people who 
are always thinking about the impression they are 
making and are trying to appear as something 
other than what they are become as uninteresting 
and as useless as last year’s birds’ nests. It is the 
unconsciousness of a life that loses all thought of 
itself in the service it seeks to render which gives 
it power. 

There are forms of influence which are deliber- 
ate and intentional. The man means to do it— 
he is making a business of it. When some one 
seeks to influence you by instruction or persua- 
sion, by the force of his argument, or by moral 
appeal, he is committing influence upon you in the 
first degree. 

But that is only a small part of a man’s influ- 
ence upon the lives of others, and not the most 
important part. He accomplishes more when he 
does it unawares. More people are run over by 
street cars when they are watching a street car 
moving in the opposite direction than in any other 
way. It gets them when they are not looking. 
People are sensitive about being influenced. They 

88 


ViI—Unconscious Influence 


are touchy about having anyone do them good, if 
he says so in advance. Those people who are 
so frightfully in earnest that they are always 
getting after you hammer-and-tongs for your 
soul’s good make you feel as if you would like to 
swear. It is the influence which goes forth from 
a life unawares which accomplishes the finest re- 
sult. i 
There came to Harvard University a famous 
preacher who caused the hearts of all who heard 
him to burn within them as he opened to them the 
Scriptures. When the service was over a very 
academic sort of professor undertook to discuss 
the minister’s sermon with him, not very success- 
fully. “But you preach, of course, to do good,” 
the man said. “Heavens, no!” the minister re- 
plied, “God forbid!” His answer might seem 
strange. But what he meant was this—he tried 
to utter his truth clearly, concisely, cogently. He 
tried to live it himself so that he might certify to 
its reality in the depths of his own soul. Then he 
stood back and let that truth go forth and find 
lodgment, if it might, in the lives of men to accom- 
plish there its natural result. And all his listeners 
had rights and reserves upon which he would not 
infringe. His method was sound. “Let your light 
so shine,” the Master said, “that men may glorify 
the Father.”’ Just let it! Be sure that what you 
have in you is light and not darkness and then it 


89 


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will go forth of itself and men will see their way 
about. 


We read here in the Old Testament of a man \ 
who had been on the mountain top. He had been | 


moving on the highest level of thought and feeling 
he had ever known. He had been twenty thou- 
sand feet above the level of the sea where the 
people of his day were paddling about. He had 
seen God face to face and those everlasting prin- 
ciples of right and wrong which underlie all human 
well-being. And when he came down the moun- 
tainside from that august experience his face 
shone so that the people could scarcely look at 
him. The radiance of his countenance frightened 
them. “And Moses wist not that his face shone” 
——that was the secret of it. If he had been think- 
ing about it, it would not have shone. It is the 
unconscious radiance of a life which has yielded 
itself utterly to the will of God and has lost all 
thought of itself in doing its work, which shows 
“the light that never was on sea or land.” 
“When thou doest thine alms sound not a trum- 


pet before thee in the streets.” When you send a . 


ton of coal to a poor family do not hire a band to 
go along. The least bit of showy pride in one’s 
generosity robs it of its beauty. Think so little 
of yourself when you are doing good that your 
right hand will not know what your left hand is 
doing. ‘And when thou prayest, be not as the 
hypocrites. They love to pray at the corners of 


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ViI—Unconscious Influence 


the streets to be seen of men. Verily they have 
their reward.” They pray to be seen of men and 
they are seen of men. They get what they prayed 
for and there is nothing more coming to them. The 
men, who pray or give or live to be seen of men 
do it all for small pay. 

One night at the college where I studied a 
senior was crossing the yard. It was late and he 
had spent his evening in a wretched debauch. He 
was feeling spotted and ashamed. As he crossed 
the campus he looked up and saw the oldest and 
best beloved member of the faculty sitting at his 
desk busily writing under the glow of an evening 
lamp. The young fellow knew that the old man 
was at work upon something which he believed 
would be useful to the world. And the contrast 
between that picture and the way he had spent 
his own evening smote him to the heart. Then 
and there he turned over a new, clean leaf and 
began to write upon it the record of a decent life. 
The old professor was not sitting there to be 
looked at; he knew nothing about that young chap 
out there in the dark; he had been so absorbed 
in his work that he had forgotten to pull down the 
shades. It was the simple unconsciousness of his 
useful action, as it was the simple unconscious- 
ness of his useful life, which made him a power 
for good on that campus. 


This finer form of influence is inevitable. When ~ 


Peter walked out into the sunshine that day there 
gl 


Yale Talks 


was his shadow beside him. He could not get 
away from it. If he ran, it ran with him; if he 
slowed down, it still kept step; if he stood stock 
still, there was his shadow, sticking closer than a 
brother. He might have said as Luther said when 
his turn came, “Here I stand casting a certain 
shadow! God ‘help me, I cannot otherwise!” 
Now influence of the more potent type is just 


with them as we do with rattlesnakes and hyenas, 
but fortunately they are scarce. There is a multi- 
tude which no man can number of people who are 
steadily injuring others by being as they are. 
They are making it easier and more natural for 
others to be narrow and mean, to be selfish and 
uncharitable, to be unbelieving and irreligious. 
They are putting the weight of whatever influence 
they possess in the wrong pan, helping to tip the 
scales toward a less worthy mode of life. 

Here is a group of college fellows or a congrega- 
tion of men and women or a whole community of 
people! The Lord of the Vineyard desires the 


Q2 


V1I—Unconscious Influence 


fine fruits of the Spirit from that entire group. 
The yield of fruit will depend upon the composite 
and prevailing moral temperature. And every 
life in the group helps to raise or to lower that 
temperature. The lives which are gross, sordid, 
material, breathing the atmosphere of ill will and 
devoid of aspiration are steadily sending the mer- 
cury down. The lives possessed by reverence, 
trust and kindliness are sending the mercury up. 
The honor of the better result in the yield of spirit- 
ual fruit in that particular situation belongs to 
these lives and to the God they serve. . 

‘The.Master was passing one day through a i 
crowded street. It was like Broadway at five 
o’clock in the afternoon. The people were jostling 
Him on every side and He could scarcely move 
along. There came up behind Him a poor woman 
who had been sick for twelve years. She had 
spent all she had on doctors and was no better. 
She thought if she could only touch the hem of 
His garment she would get well. It was a blind 
sort of faith, the idea that she could be healed on 
the sly, without His knowing anything about it, 
by simply touching His clothes. It was blind, 
but it was real. And because her touch was the 
touch of faith and because He was robed in help- 
fulness the woman was made whole. Virtue went 
forth from Him inevitably at the touch of honest 
faith. In like manner men are rubbing off some- 
thing from us in all these chance contacts of life. 


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Yale Talks 


And it is possible for any life to be so dynamic 
in its sense of fellowship with God and in its 
kindly consideration of others that what is rubbed 
off will do good. We are meant to be branches 
of the True Vine handing on the help that was in 
Him. | 
~ It is only now-and then that a man has a chance 
to influence deeply another life by direct effort, 
but these doors of involuntary communication 
stand forever open. The traffic in influence be- 
tween life and life is like the traffic between the 
lungs of the animal world and the emanations of 
plant life. We exhale what they inhale. We 
inhale what they exhale. The carbon dioxide 
which we give off they take up, and that which 
they give off is for our good. This explains why 
it is good for us to get away from crowds of peo- 
ple into the woods. The same sort of give and 
take goes on between these lives of ours. The 
way a man walks down street with a strut or 
swagger or with the natural gait of a true man; 
the tone of voice he uses in discussing the weather 
or the war; the look he wears upon his face, sym- 
pathetic or otherwise; the very atmosphere he 
bears with him of kindliness or of selfish indiffer- 
ence—all these make a life fragrant or repellent. 
They determine the quality of that impact which 
everyone makes upon the lives of his fellows. 
Two college men had returned to their Alma 
Mater to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of 


94 


VI—Unconscious Influence 


their graduation. They were going about the 
town when they saw one of their former profes- 
sors on the street. He was an old man now and 
much broken. He was poorly dressed, for his 
salary had been small. He had never written a 
great book; he had never made an important 
scientific discovery; he had never been summoned 
to Harvard or Yale or Princeton to receive an 
honorary degree; he had never entered even the 
suburbs of what men call “the public eye.” He 
had spent his whole life teaching Greek, which 
was almost as unpopular then as it is now. “What 
did you learn from the old chap when you were 
here?” one of these graduates asked the other. 
“T learned to be a man,” was the quick reply, “and 
I shall be grateful to him as long as I live.” He 
had probably forgotten all his Greek in forty 
years, but the imprint of that man’s life was still 
there. Happy the professor, happy the individual 
anywhere who teaches a boy to be a man and 
starts him on a career of honor! It is a work 
accomplished mainly by the unstudied output of 
a man’s soul. ‘th 

When the Master was eating the Last Supper 
with His disciples, He said to them, “I have given 
you something.” And He named it. It was not 
money—He had no money to speak of. It was 
not an appointment to high office—it did not lie 
in His power to set men on the right hand or the 
left hand of authority, as He was sometimes asked 


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Yale Talks 


to do. He gave them something of more worth 
than all that. “I have given you an example,” He 
said, “that ye should do as I have done.” 

_ And when those men looked at Him they knew 
that He had given them the best gift of all. In 
Him the word of right living was made flesh and 
dwelt among them full of grace and truth. The 
language of religion had been translated into terms 
of life; and the fact that it had been done became 
a standing pledge that something like that could 
be done again by the grace of God. He made 
goodness winsome and compelling in its power 
of appeal, so that wherever He is lifted up He 
draws men to Him. May grace be given us to 
make our lives so real and so true that the natural 
unstudied output of each life shall be a power for 
good! | 


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Vil 
The Lessons of Failure 


ERE was a boatload of men who were cold 

and hungry and cross, for they had been 
out all night fishing and had not caught anything. 
There the Master saw His opportunity. He came 
to them, not at the moment of some splendid suc- 
cess, but in the hour of failure. He reaches out 
His hand to many a life, not when it is on the 
crest of the wave, but when it is in the trough of 
the sea and liable to be drowned. Man’s extrem- 
ity is God’s opportunity. “When I am weak,” the 
Apostle cried, “then am I made strong” with a 
finer form of strength. And that is what I want to 
speak to you about this morning, The Lessons of 
Failure. 

The men in the boat had been relying on their 
own strength. They were no tenderfeet, picking 
their way daintily around the Sea of Galilee for 
the first time. They were not amateurs, fishing 
as a kind of pastime while they were off on a sum- 
mer vacation. Fishing was their trade; it brought 
them their bread and butter. They made a busi- 
ness of it. 


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Yale Talks 


And they had wintered and summered with that 
old lake. They had fished it by day and by night 


and in all weathers. They knew every cove along — 


its shores and every deep hole where the fish might - 
lie. They knew all the best places to fish, for 
they had tried them out a hundred times. They 
knew what sort of sky was best for fishing, and 
from what quarter it was best to have the wind 
blow. You could not tell them anything about 
fishing in the Sea of Galilee. 

They were prepared to resent it when this man 
from Nazareth, which was a small town ten miles 
back in the country, began to make suggestions 
to them about fishing. Peter said to him, “We 
have toiled all night and have taken nothing.” 
What good would it do to “launch out into the 
deep” and let down their nets again! They were 
cold, hungry, and cross, as men always are when 
they have fished all night without results, and 
they did not want any advice from any quarter 
whatsoever. 

How modern it allis! You will hear men today 
scorning the approach of those finer methods and 
ideals which come from Nazareth. “Business is 
business,” they say—“You cannot mix religion 
with business.” Human nature is selfish, and you 
cannot change human nature by an Act of Con- 
gress, or by a few intellectual flourishes. Do unto 
others as they would like to do unto you, and do 
it first. If you do not look out for Number One, 

98 


Vii—Lessons of Failure 


who will? We know all about it; we have fished 
these waters by day and by night. We have been 
in business for forty years, and we have fought 
these labor unions and these uplift people to a 
finish over and over again. 

These men are dead sure—dead is exactly the 
right word in that connection—that the Man of 
Nazareth cannot tell them anything about the 
way to carry on their business. “Launch out into 
the deep,” indeed—they think that they know 
more about the deep than He does. 

Some of them will never learn any better until 
they have attended the school of failure. So long 
as they win out with their gospel of materialism 
they will believe that the race is to the swift, the 
battle to the strong, and victory for the man with 
the longest purse. They will remain as blind as 
Peter was that day at Capernaum. Until they 
have come through some long hard year of effort 
with empty boats and with empty hearts, they will 
not be ready to welcome the One from Nazareth, 
who shows men where to fish and how to live. 

The Sea of Galilee is a small affair—it is only 
thirteen miles long, and you can see across it 
from shore to shore. But the sea of life reaches 
from Pole to Pole and far beyond. Its depth no 
man knows. And all along the shores of that 
vaster sea men and women are being beaten. 
They toil the whole year through and take nothing 
worthy of their effort. They go forth relying on 


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their own wisdom, but the sea of life proves too 
much for them. 

There was a man in the Scriptures who was 
down and out and did not know it. He did not 
know it because he was well dressed and had just 
eaten a good dinner. He said in haughty fashion, 
“J am rich and increased with goods and have 
need of nothing.” Then the Spirit of God turned 
him inside out and showed him how he looked 
to those who had eyes to see. He was made to 
realize that he was “wretched and miserable, blind 
and naked.” And in that hour of moral humilia- 
tion he was told to buy gold tried in the fire that 
he might be rich, and the white raiment of a new 
life that he might be clothed, and to anoint his 
eyes that he might see. The man who is tempted 
to settle down in lazy satisfaction with some 
meagre bit of success needs the sobering influence 
of failure to enable him to get his bearings. 

In that hour of failure these men in the boat 
learned to walk by faith. The Master said, 
“Launch out into the deep and let down your 
nets.” They felt sure that it would be of no use. 
It was not the time of day to fish—night was the 
time to fish, and they had fished all night without 
catching anything. What could they expect in the . 
broad glare of the sun! And they had fished in 
all the best places in the lake—it would be a 
waste of effort to try again in that spot to which 
He was pointing. 

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ViiI—Lessons of Failure 

It had everything against it—everything but 
His word. He asked them to do it, and as much 
to please Him as anything else they took up the 
same old net and let it down out of the same 
old boat into the same old sea where they had 
failed. And now they caught so many fish that 
they could scarcely land them—they all but broke 
their nets. ‘They were taking their first steps in 
learning to walk by faith. 

We have tried and failed; nevertheless at Thy 
word we will try again. That is the method 
whereby the most satisfying successses in life are 
won. Where the exercise of your own judgment 
in putting forth your strength has left you with 
an empty boat and an empty heart, try it again 
in His way. Launch out and let down your net for 
a draft of something which you have not found 
as yet. It is there, and He knows that it is there, 
and He knows that you need it beyond anything 
else. And all your shrewd sayings about “Busi- 
ness is business” will not fill your nets nor fill 
your life with peace and joy, unless you learn to 
use your strength at His word. 

The Germans got into all this mess because 
they knew it all. They brought upon themselves 
this frightful national disaster; they have lost all 
chance for any real place in the sun for the next 
hundred years; they have plunged themselves into 
a depth of moral contempt in the eyes of the whole 
world from which they may not emerge for cen- 

IOI 


Yale Talks 


turies, because they were so cocksure. No one 
could tell them anything about “might and effi- 
ciency.” They knew where to fish and how to 
live. They had “the will to power” and they 
would promptly fill their boats with the best there 
was in all the seven seas. 

Now look at the results of their philosophy of 
life. They have toiled for thirty years in prepara- 
tion for “The Day,” and they find themselves 
with empty boats or with no boats at all, with an 
empty treasury and an empty soul. And their 
sorest need today is not for men or for money, 
for munitions or for mines—it is to learn the mean- 
ing of this statement, “Not by might nor by power, 
but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts,” do 
men gain their real success. 

You may find yourselves in some situation 
where it is “experience versus faith.” It was so — 
with this boatload of men. When they made their 
first venture, they were relying upon their own 
skill and experience as fishermen, upon their 
knowledge of the sea, and upon the strength of 
their right arms. They were as confident as the 
Kaiser was in 1914, yet they came back with an 
empty boat. 

When they made their second venture, they had 
nothing but the sense of humility consequent upon 
their failure and the spirit of obedience to the 
Master’s word—and this time they came back 
with a boatload of fish. “At Thy word we will!” 


I02 





V II—Lessons of Failure 


The plain straight act of obedience to His will was 
of more worth than all their strength and skill. 

“He that heareth these sayings of mine and 
doeth them, I will liken unto a wise man.”” Human 
judgment walks by sight and because its eyes are 
holden, it brings up many a time in the ditch. 
The spirit of obedient trust walks by faith, and 
because it walks with Him it walks with sure 
tread in the way that goeth upward. 

The Man from Nazareth showed them that day 
that He knew something about fishing. He knows 
something about farming and about business. He 
knows something about politics and about the 
affairs of nations. His word of counsel and His 
high command are the best assets to be had in any 
of these great interests. He knows the sea of life 
—He has sailed it in all weathers, tempted and 
tested at all points like as we are. He knows the 
deep places where the rich values in human experi- 
ence are to be taken. He knows how to fill men’s 
hearts with that which is life indeed. You can 
afford to stake your all upon obedience to His 
high command. 

If you want a fine word to inscribe on the flag 
which flies from your masthead as you sail the 
sea of life, take this one—‘‘At Thy word, I will.” 
When you take that line you are not leaning upon 
your own understanding, you are committing your 
way unto the Lord that He may direct your paths. 
You are not depending upon your own unaided 

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strength, you are conscious that underneath and 
around you are His everlasting arms which will 
not let you fall. You are saying what the Master 
said in that hour when the shadow of the Cross 
was falling upon His pathway and the Roman 
soldiers were approaching in the dark—“I am 
not alone, the Father is with me.” With that fine 
purpose in command as you sail out, your ship 
will not go upon the rocks, nor will it return from 
its voyage empty. It will come back laden with 
the precious cargo of a more abundant life. 

These men learned their lesson by trying again 
at the very place where they had failed. They 
were not called away from the scene of their 
defeat to some other lake where the fishing was 
better. They tried again with the same old net, 
in the same old boat, and in the same old sea. But 
they did it now at His word and they did not fail. 

Any boat will do, if you launch it at His com- 
mand. Any sort of a net will do, if you let it down 
in the place He indicates. Any hour of the day 
will be a good time to fish, if He is there co-operat- 
ing with you. It is not a change of location nor a 
fresh supply of tackle which most men need for 
a higher success, but a change of heart. 

The place for any man to get up is where he fell 
down. There was Zaccheus, the richest man in 
Jericho. He was little in stature, and little in 
every other way. His two most glaring faults 
as we gather from the context were these, he was 

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ViI—Lessons of Failure 


dishonest and he was stingy. These qualities had 
helped to make him the richest man in town. 

When the Master sat at meat with him, reveal- 
ing him to himself, Zaccheus saw the door by 
which salvation must come to his house. “Lord,” 
he said, “if I have taken anything from any man 
by false accusation, I will restore him fourfold; 
and the half of my goods I give to the poor.” He 
had been dishonest and stingy and now the first 
two words he utters as a renewed man are “re- 
store” and “give.” He begins to get up at the very 
point where he had fallen down. 

We are not surprised when bad men fail and 
fools go down in defeat. But sometimes good 
men fail and wise men meet with the sorest kind 
of disaster. The sea of life has been too much 
for them and they have toiled for years with noth- 
ing to show for it. At such a time some of them 
feel impelled to run away under cover of darkness 
to some distant spot of earth, and some of them 
in cowardly fashion take their own lives, and are 
seen no more on any spot of earth. 

It is a poor use to make of such an experience. 
It is tragic where men refuse to reap the harvest 
of a failure bravely met and nobly borne. “The 
foolish make of their failures graves wherein they 
bury all their highest hopes. The wise make of 
their failures ladders whereby they climb toward 
Heaven.” Right here where you met your Water- 
loo is the place for you to show that “greater is he 

105 


Yale Talks 


that ruleth his own spirit than he that taketh a 
city.” 

Th the Yale School of Religion we had one year 
a vigorous young fellow from a far Western state. 
He was earning his own way, and he was an excel- 
lent student in every sense of the word. He had 
an older brother. who was in business for himself 
in a modest way. This brother was unfortunate 
in some of his ventures, and presently found him- 
self with two thousand dollars more liabilities 
than assets, and certain obligations which had to 
be met without delay. He saw no way out of it, 
and he wrote to the young theolog that he would 
have to make an assignment and take refuge in 
bankruptcy. : 

Then our young chap, who was no lath-and- 
plaster saint, but quartered oak, wrote back, “We 
will not have any bankrupts in our family—we 
are not that sort. Turn over all you have to your 
creditors, and then you assume one thousand dol- 
lars of that indebtedness and work it off, and I 
will take care of the other thousand.” He wrote 
shorthand and used a typewriter, and had other 
strings to his bow. During his middle year in the 
seminary he supported himself, carried full work 
with high grades and earned on the side eight 
hundred dollars of that indebtedness. The fol- 
lowing year he cleared off the balance, and those 
two brothers faced the world with their heads up. 
He was preparing for the work of the Christian 

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ViII—Lessons of Failure 


ministry, and this was part of his preparation. 
When he begins to preach his word will be with 
power and his life will give light to men. 

“Stay in your boat,” the Master said to the men 
who had toiled all night and failed. Stay right 
there in your boat, but “launch out into the deep.” 
You have been fishing too close to shore. You 
have been seeking “safety first” rather than obe- 
dience to His high command. You have been 
fishing in shoal water catching minnows when you 
might have been doing business in the great waters 
of spiritual experience. Launch out again upon 
the very same lake, but in that deeper water let 
down your nets. 

Here are students in high school or in college 
fishing along the edges of a great opportunity! 
They have a splendid chance, but they are allow- 
ing it to slip by without utilizing it. All the mental 
and moral unfolding they are getting might be 
compared to a small mess of sardines. 

You long to say to them, “Launch out!” Enter 
more profoundly into the meaning and power of 
these educational facilities which are at hand! 
The purpose of education is not to pack a lot of 
undigested information into a man’s head, or to 
hang a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain, 
or to write certain letters after his name indicating 
his degrees. All this is mere frill and ornament. 
The purpose of education is to make each man 
more heavily responsible for the welfare of his 

107 


@ 


Yale Talks 


own community. It is to develop in each one a 
sense of personal adequacy to those demands 
which society has a right to make upon him, and 
to establish him in the spirit of readiness to make 
response in terms of useful, competent action. 
Launch out where the water is over your head, 
and let your education count for something worth 
while. 

Here are men and women in mature life, who 
are conscious of a certain mental poverty! They 
manage to look over a great deal of print in the 
course of each week, but you could scarcely say 
that they have learned to read. When they under- 
take to apply their minds to the more serious, 
vital interests of life, they lack insight and grasp. 
When they think they do not seem to produce any- 
thing. When they talk there is a certain empti- 
ness and futility about it all. 

They, too, have been fishing in shoal water. 
If they would cast overboard the principal part 
of that cargo of “reading matter” which was never 
worth printing and is not now worth reading, and 
launch out into some real concern with the more 
vital truths, they would be amazed at the result. 
It was One who spake as never man spake who 
gave us this challenge: “Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart and with all thy mind 
and with all thy strength. I am the Truth, and 
ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall 
make you free.” 

108 


VII—Lessons of Failure 


Here are multitudes of men and women who 
are paddling to and fro in the shoal waters of 
religious interest! They are not infidels—they 
have some small measure of religious faith. They 
are not indifferent to religion—they attend church 
on pleasant Sundays when nothing better offers. 
They have a mild desire to be useful in their day 
and generation, if it does not involve too much 
inconvenience. Their religious life is not insin- 
cere, but it is superficial. It has no depth of con- 
viction; no deep underlying sense of agreement 
with the will of God; it does not uncover to them 
the deeper sources of motive and stimulus. They 
have never tried to think their way through to a 
clear-cut, definite, religious faith, or to enter into 
the power of heartfelt worship, or to show a reso- 
lute effort to make the principles of the Master 
the guiding principles of their own lives. 

You long to say to them, “Launch out into the 
deep upon that sea where you have failed. Seek 
to know what David and Isaiah, what Jesus and 
Paul had to say about life! Lay hold upon your 
full share of that inheritance, undefiled, uncor- 
ruptible, that fadeth not away, reserved in Heaven 
for those who are kept by the power of God.” 

Religion is not a mere form of words nor a mere 
set of observances to which we may now and then 
turn aside, nor a mere supply of small change in 
kindly acts of service. Religion is life, life abun- 

109 


Yale Talks 


dant, life eternal, life without limits in its capacity 
for advance. 

Twenty odd years ago I was making the trip 
through Palestine on horseback with a group of 
friends. We camped one night at Capernaum 
there on the Sea of Galilee. We had Sea of 
Galilee fish for. breakfast next morning. When 
the rest of the party started on that day on the 
road to Damascus, I tarried behind. I had been 
riding for days in the dust and heat, and the 
thought of a swim in the cool, clear water of that 
lake was most attractive. 

I tied my horse to a sycamore tree something 
like the one Zaccheus used in Jericho. Then I 
made ready and swam out into the lake. I thought 
of Peter and James and John fishing in those 
waters. I thought of the Master as He walked 
along the beach and called to them in the hour 
of their discouragement. And it all seemed so 
near and so real! I swam ashore and dressed, 
and there in the quiet of that morning hour, with 
no one near but Him, I knelt down and prayed 
that I might become a more competent fisher of 
men. It may not have been the result of that 
single prayer, but I know that when I returned 
to my field of labor in this country there was in 
my ministry a deeper note. 

Here we are, then, setting forth in our little 
boats upon the sea of life! There beneath the 
surface, hidden from our eyes, are treasures in- 

TIO 


ViI—Lessons of Failure 


numerable. They are meant for us. It is not His 
will that any life should remain empty and futile. 
I care not how many times you may have prayed 
when it seemed as if the heavens were brass. I 
care not how many times the burdens of duty 
laid upon you have been so heavy as to make you 
stagger. I care not how many times you have 
been tempted and have failed. There is some- 
thing better in store for you and for me and for’ 
all hands. 

We may have toiled all night, all the year, all 
through a decade, without taking anything which 
satisfied our desires. Nevertheless, at His word 
launch out where the water is deeper and the issues 
greater and give it another try. If you make your 
supreme attempt in the spirit of reverent trust 
toward Him, with a feeling of intelligent good will 
toward all your fellows, and with an honest desire 
to gain that which will be best, you will not fail. 


rit 


VIIl 
The Men Who Make Excuse 


HERE are two sorts in the world, the men 

who do things and the men who are always 
ready with elaborate explanations as to why they 
did not get the things done. The world frankly 
prefers the first type—it saves its highest honors 
for them and steadily puts the other sort into the 
discard. It is for every one to make up his mind 
as early as possible with which group he proposes 
to travel. ) 

Here is a short story told by the Prince of 
Story Tellers, who “spake many things in para- 
bles,” showing the folly of attempting to palm off 
on the world the shoddy of excuses in place of 
the all-wool of genuine achievement. He was 
being entertained in the home of plenty and this 
Story was part of His table talk. He had just 
indicated in a telling way the duty of the strong 
to the weak. “When thou makest a feast do not 
always invite your rich neighbors who will natur- 
ally invite you again.” Do not always invite 
those who already have more than enough to eat— 
invite the poor who have less. 

The situation at once became somewhat 

112 


VIilI—Men Who Make Excuse 


strained. The people at that dinner table were 
not accustomed to such plain talk. There came 
one of those painful silences which sometimes _ 
_ befall a dinner party when something too real 
and searching has been said. Then one of those 
smiling individuals who always carry a good 
supply of small change and pious platitude came 
to the relief of his host.. He filled up the awkward 
gap in the conversation by saying, ‘Blessed is he 
that shall eat bread in the Kingdom of God.” 

No exception can be taken to this statement as 
a general proposition. But the Master was not 
accustomed to do business in the shallow waters 
of platitude. He at once launched out into the 
deep and let down his net for a draught of some- 
thing vital. He told them a most unlikely story 

_ of a rich man who made a great supper and 
\ invited many guests. The invitations were all 
accepted apparently, but when the time came the 
guests began to beg off with the most absurd sort 
of excuses. This is not the way of the world—it 
is not the way people ordinarily treat invitations 
to great suppers or to the marriage feast of the 
king’s son. And it was by this improbable picture 
of human action that Christ sought to show the 
_ folly of those who, having the privilege of becom- 

. Ing the chosen guests of God, refuse the call. 

The invitation was an act of grace. Any 
honest invitation is just that. The man who in- 
vites you to dinner does not have to do it. He 

113 


Yale Talks 


does not expect to get anything in return for it— 
if he did he would not be exercising the grace of 
hospitality, he would simply be doing a little 
business with you. If you should offer at the 
close of the evening to pay him for your dinner 
he would be amazed and grieved. His invitation 


_ springs from an unselfish interest in your comfort 


and pleasure. “Come,” he says, ‘‘for all things 
are now ready! The fatlings are killed and the 
dinner is on the table.” All you have to do is to 
enter into the full enjoyment of the best that has 
been prepared for your coming. 

Here the invitation to the supper stands as a 
symbol of that broad summons of the Father in 
Heaven. He invites us all at this hour to enter 
into loving fellowship with Him and enjoy the 
best that He can provide. Come, for all things 
are now ready—all things that belong to man’s 
highest estate, to the full realization of his own 
powers, and to the rendering of that service which 
will make him an honored and useful member of 
society. It only needs the personal acceptance 
and co-operation of each individual. And the 
acceptance of that invitation through the dedica- 
tion of one’s powers to the highest he sees con- 
stitutes the very essence of Christian character. 
When any man does that the Giver of the Feast 
begins to feed him with the Bread from above and 
to drink with him His own wine new in the King- 
dom of God. 


II4 


VilI—Men Who Make Excuse 


But the men in the story allowed things legiti- 

mate and praiseworthy to stand in the way of 
their supreme loyalty. ‘They all with one con- 
sent began to make excuse.” The first man said, 
“TI have bought a piece of ground, and I must go 
and see it; I pray thee have me excused.” 
Another said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen 
and I must go and prove them! I pray thee have 
me excused.” And a third said, “I have married 
a wife and therefore I cannot come.” 
_ Now, none of these interests is evil—they are 
~ all good. It is highly desirable that men should 
own land, and that farmers should purchase 
oxen, and that young men should marry wives 
and be devoted to them. It was not as if one had 
said, “I am planning to go out and get drunk 
that night—I pray thee have me excused!” Or 
as if another had said, “I have arranged to rob 
a bank in the next town that night, therefore I 
cannot come.” Or as if a third had said, “I am 
purposing to go out and burn the buildings of my 
rival in business that night; therefore I shall not 
be there.” It was not a series of crimes which 
led to the moral failure of the men in the story— 
it was their preoccupation with interests entirely 
legitimate which crowded out that which was of 
supreme importance. 

Let me put it in modern terms! Here, in any 
community you want to name, are people who 
mean sometime to be noble, high-minded Chris- 

II5 


Yale Talks 


tians, only they have not quite gotten around to 
it as yet. They have been busy with a number of 
other things, the movies, the newspapers, the 
games of bridge that have to be played. Now 
these side issues which I have named are not 
evil. The movies for the most part are entirely 
_Innocent—the only thing to be said against them 
_ is that they are so deadly dull as arule. But when 
young people fall into the habit of going once 
every day and sometimes twice a day in order to 
see all the reels which are brought to town, thus 
spending a vast amount of time in a cheap and 
easy form of diversion where all that is required 
is that one should sit and look, they become a 
menace to interests more vital. 

It is desirable that everyone should read the 
newspapers in order to know what is going on; 
and the great mass of that which is printed is not 
morally hurtful. But when this lighter form of 
intellectual effort, which engages only the surface 
of one’s mind, crowds out the reading of books 
which deal with matters in a more serious and 
vital way, then the papers become a nuisance. 
Sometime, somewhere, everyone who has a head 
on his shoulders and not merely a place to wear 
his hat ought to learn to think. The hasty skim- 
ming through a lot of newspapers does not en- 
courage thinking. And the game at cards as a 
means of relaxation from a hard day’s work has 
its place. It is a loss where people fall into the 

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V1ilI—Men Who Make Excuse 


way of spending all their leisure hours in counting 
~ black and red spots. In every such case the less 
may crowd out the greater. 

| Here in the story the good became the enemy of 
the best. In real life the choice as a rule does not 
lie between the best and the worst. If a man has 
sunk to that level where he considers the worst as 
a possible option, the best is no longer within his 
reach. Men are constantly choosing between 
things which are good in their way and that best 
line of effort which has the right to command 
one’s final allegiance. The boy in school who 
manages to “pass”—he is not actually sent home 
in disgrace—and contents himself with that, 
leaving the higher levels of mental and spiritual 
efficiency unreached; the mature man who does 
something which “gets by,” as he says—it may 
hit the doorposts on both sides but it squeezes 
through; the line of conduct which does not land 
a man in the police court or in open scandal, but 
never gains anything worthy to be called char- 
~ acter—all these have failed by allowing the good 
to become the enemy of the best. 

Here in the Bible was a soldier who in the midst 
of a great battle was set to guard an important 
prisoner who had been captured. That was his 
particular business in connection with that 
battle. But when the king came the prisoner was 
gone, and all the soldier had to say for himself 
was this, “As thy servant was busy here and 

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Yale Talks 


there he was gone.” ‘There were a dozen different 
things which he thought he might do. None of 
them were evil things—he was not going over to 
the enemy or showing himself a traitor to his 
country, but somehow in giving attention to these 
other interests the supreme thing went undone. 
As thy servant was busy here and there with a 
little of this and a little of that, lo! the prisoner 
he was set to guard escaped. 

The young man in a military camp is there to 
be trained as a soldier—if he fails in that, he 
fails. The young man in college is there to gain 
that mental and moral unfolding which changes a 
boy into a man—if he fails at that point he fails. 
The boy in preparatory school is there for that 
discipline and development which will fit him 
thoroughly for the harder duties which lie ahead— 
if he gets by without accomplishing the main 
purpose of those years he goes down in defeat. 

This was the answer Jesus gave to that pious 
humbug who uttered his platitude about the 
blessedness of eating bread in the Kingdom of 
God. He said to those men who sat at meat with 
him, “How much do all these truths about religion 
mean to you? Are you taking your religion 
seriously? Is it anything more to you than a 
form of words on your lips or a set of graceful 
observances to which you may turn aside? Are 
you willing to make sacrifices in the matter of 
land and other property interests or in the enjoy- 

118 


VIII—Men Who Make Excuse 


ment of your home comforts in order to serve 
God in His Kingdom? Unless you are ready to 
put first things first and subordinate the lesser 
interests to the demands of character and service, 
you are all humbugs.” 

The way of advance does not lie through the 
destruction of those interests but in their con- 
secration. The man whose life is ample and 
varied is not asked to destroy his advantages. 
The one who has five talents of personal ability 
has five times the capacity for usefulness over 
the man of one talent whose life is meagre. He 
had best not throw away four-fifths of his ability 
in order to put himself on an equality with his 
less fortunate fellow. He had best devote those 
talents to the high ends they are meant to serve. 

In the long run the way of renunciation is easier 
_ and less creditable than the way of consecration. 
\ It is easier for a full-blooded man to starve 
himself by an ascetic mode of life and thus avoid 
the coarse sins of the flesh than for him to remain 
full-blooded, keeping himself fit and bringing all 
those splendid powers into obedience to the spirit 
of Christ. The latter, however, is the harder and 
holier line of action. 

It would be easier for many a rich man to give 
away all of his money to the poor than to keep it 
_ and administer it in a thoroughly Christian way 
by investing it in enterprises which yield him a 
livelihood and furnish many other people the same 

I19 


Yale Talks 


chance to earn their livings in honest employ- 
ment. The way of use and consecration, however, 
is a finer way than that of renunciation and 
destruction. 

Here is a man who builds a factory and con- 
ducts it in such a way that the smoke which 
pours from the tall chimney is a black flag of 
piracy. He is robbing men and women of the 
better wages they ought to have, and robbing them 
of their manhood and their womanhood by making 
the conditions of their toil unjust and inhuman. 
He may make shoes or guns or steam engines, but 
he is not making manhood or womanhood for 
those whose lives are bound up with his own in 
that enterprise. Here is another man who builds 
a factory and operates it in such a way that the 
smoke from the tall chimney is a pillar of cloud 
by day, guiding all those other lives toward the 
Land of Promise in the spirit of good will. And 
this consecration of his means to good ends 
becomes the harder and holier mode of life. 

“Live then,” as William DeWitt Hyde of 
Bowdoin used to say, “in the active voice rather 
than in the passive, thinking more of what you 
can do than of what may happen to you. Live in 
the indicative mood rather than the subjunctive, 
concerned with facts as they are rather than as 
they might be. Live in the present tense, con- 
centrating upon the duty at hand without regret 
for the past or worry for the future. Live in the 

I20 


VIII—Men Who Make Excuse 


singular number, seeking the approval of your 
own conscience rather than popularity with the 

many. Live in the first person, criticizing your- 
self rather than condemning others.” And inas- 
much as you must have some verb to conjugate 
in your everyday life you can not do better than 
to take the one we used both in Latin and in 
English—amo, I love. I live in the spirit of good 
will toward God and men in the use I make of all 
these gifts of His grace. 

The man who bought the piece of ground could 
have postponed his visit to it until the next day— 
it would have looked all the more beautiful to him 
had he first discharged his duty by being present 
at the feast to which he had accepted an invita- 
tion. The man who went to try his yoke of oxen 
might have hitched them to his cart and have 
driven them to the supper—it was before the days 
of rapid transit. The man who had married a 
wife might have brought her with him—if she was 
any kind of a wife the feast would have been all 
the better for having her there. In every case 
the natural, wholesome, legitimate interests of 
anyone’s life had best be not cut out nor lopped 
off, but brought in as part of the total service to 
the cause of human well-being. 

When these men refused the invitation the 
opportunity passed. The master of the house, 
when he received those silly excuses, said to his 
servant, “Go out into the highways and hedges 

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Yale Talks 


and bring in the poor, the lame and the blind.” 
They would not be so occupied with their land, 
their oxen and their home comforts that they 
would be unwilling to come. “Let my house be 
filled with guests but none of those men who were 
bidden shall taste of my supper.” The feast 
went on, but without those men who had refused 
_ the call. The door of opportunity opens but it 
does not stand forever open—when men pass by 
the door is shut. 

Here in a short poem the author puts these 
words on the lips of his principal speaker, whom 
he calls Opportunity. 


“ Master of human destinies am I, 
Both fame and fortune on my footsteps wait, 
I knock unbidden once at each man’s gate. 
If sleeping wake, if feasting rise 
Before I turn away. 
It is the hour of fate.” 


The scientific men tell us that in the develop- 
ment of every unfolding life there comes a time 
for the marshalling of cells for the building of 
certain tissues and the forming of certain organs. 
Tf the work is not done at that time it can never 
be done again and done right. If that period 
passes without the proper development of those 
organs the life is born imperfect or deformed. In 
the case of a human life there may come a surgical 

I22 


VIII—Men Who Make Excuse 


operation to correct so far as may be what grew 
wrong in the first place. But the organism will 
never have the strength and symmetry it was 
meant to have. 

“There is a tide in the affairs of men,” morally 
as well as physically, “which taken at the flood 
leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of 
that life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” 
There is a time for the formation of Christian 
habits of thought, Christian modes of feeling, 
Christian lines of action. Do it then, for it can 
never be done so well again. There is a time for 
the cultivation of that temper and disposition 
which make for character of the highest sort. 
Seize your chance with both hands and compel it 
to yield the best it was set to bring. It is the 
voice of Scripture and of experience and of God, 
which says, “Now is the accepted time, now is the 
day of salvation.” Do it now, for tomorrow may 
be too late. 

In that great day when the Son of man gathers 
the nations before Him and separates them as a 
shepherd divides the sheep from the goats, some 
people will be standing on the right hand. They 
will be possessed of Christian character. They 
saw their chance and made the most of it. And 
they will hear the words, “Come, ye blessed of 
My Father. Inherit the Kingdom prepared for 
you from the foundation of the world. Ye did it 
unto Me.” Other men will be standing on the 

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Yale Talks 


left hand without that Christian character which 
might have been theirs. They will stand there 
offering their excuses. “Our parents were so 
strict with us when we were children that we were 
turned against religion. We were made to go to 
church so much in our youth that when we grew 
up we hated it. . We met some church members 
once who were hypocrites”—as if there were no 
hypocrites in the world outside of the church 
where they stand. “If we had understood all the 
mysteries connected with religion, we might have 
become Christians”—as if no one could ride on 
a trolley car until he understood all the mysteries 
connected with electricity. And in that day 
neither God nor man will feel much sympathy for 
those who undertake to make excuses take the 
place of results. The word to them will be, “De- 
part, ye did it not to Me.” 

When Lord Kitchener was in Egypt one of his 
subordinates came to him to explain why a cer- 
tain order given the day before had not been 
carried out. There were any number of reasons, 
he said, why the thing could not be done. 
Kitchener listened for three minutes and then cut 
him short by saying, “Your reasons are excellent. 
In fact, I think they are about the best reasons I 
ever heard. Now go and do it and report to me 
tomorrow morning that the work is complete.” 
When the sun rose next day the thing was done. 
He was a man who never excused himself nor 

124 


ViItI—Men Who Make Excuse 


others and he will go down in history as ‘“‘Kitch- 
ener of Khartoum, the man who did things.” 

“Be ye, therefore, doers of the Word and not 
hearers only deceiving yourselves.” “Not every- 
one that saith unto Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter 
the Kingdom, but he that doeth the will of My 
Father who is in Heaven.” “Him that over- 
cometh I will make a pillar in the temple of My 
God to go no more out. And I will write upon him 
the name of my God to indicate of what sort of 
stuff he is and the name of the city of My God 
to indicate where he is to dwell, and I will write 
upon him My new name,” 


125 


IX 
The Power of Sentiment 


ERE was a full-grown man who was home- 

sick—he was homesick for the joys of his 
youth! He was a man of affairs who had written 
the word SUCCESS over against his name in 
capital letters. He was the king of his country 
and the greatest king that Israel ever had. But 
here at the close of a long, hot day he was thirsty 
and he found himself longing for a drink of water 
from the old well on his father’s farm. “O for a 
drink of water from the well in Bethlehem by the 
gate.” He had played around that well as a boy. 
He had drunk from its cool depths on many a 
sultry afternoon. Now in his maturity he longs 
for a drink of water which would taste as that 
water tasted when he was a boy. 

You know the feeling. You may have wished 
that the coffee this morning would taste as it did 
when your mother made it. You may have wished 
that Christmas and the circus and things generally 
would produce in you once more the old thrills of 
delight. Now, as a matter of fact, the water and 
the coffee, Christmas and the circus, have not 

126 


TX—Power of Sentiment 


changed except for the better. But you have 
changed—you and David. The fresh, unjaded 
appetite of the boy is gone. The keen zest and 
relish for some forms of experience are no longer 
yours. Your sensibilities have been blunted by 
the passing years, and that is the reason why a 
drink of water from the well no longer tastes like 
the nectar of the gods. 

But David’s longing went deeper than the con- 
tents of a well. The water was only an outward 
and physical sign of an inward and spiritual 
satisfaction which he craved. He longed for the 
innocence and radiant serenity of his unstained 
youth. He wished that he might find himself 
again a shepherd boy keeping watch over his 
flock and singing, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I 
shall not want.” He wished that he could feel 
again the joy of striking down that Philistine 
giant with sling and stone and hear again the 
plaudits of the soldiers. He wished that he could 
see himself coming up again from the sheepfold 
to be anointed king of Israel. In those great 
days his life was all unstained by serious wrong- 
doing. It was sound and clean—it sang as the 
birds sing in the trees. 

Now he had sinned grievously against God and 
man. He had been guilty of murder and adultery. 
He had a load upon his heart which even the divine 
mercy had not removed. You can feel the heart- 
ache in those words which fell from his lips, “O 

127 


Yale Talks 


for a drink of experience from the well of boyhood 
which is by the gate.” 
As one of our own poets has it, 


“Break, break, break, 
On thy cold gray stones, O sea! 
And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me. 


“Break, break, break, 
At the foot of thy crags, O sea! 
But the tender grace of a day that is gone 
Will never come back to me.” 


He was homesick. He wished that he could 
turn back the files of time and live over again 
those early years. He would certainly avoid the 
folly and the wickedness which had brought him 
pain. Half aloud and half to himself, he says, 
“OQ for a drink of water from the well in Bethle- 
hem.” Three of his soldiers, mighty men of valor, 
heard him, and then the rest of the story follows 
as you all know it. Let me hold it up before you 
as a picture which sheds light upon the power and 
value of wholesome sentiment. 

The three mighty men did a brave deed because 
they loved their king. They stole out that night 
through the enemy’s lines, taking their lives in 
their hands, for the Philistines would have killed 
them on the spot had they been discovered. They 
went on through the enemy’s country under 
cover of darkness until they reached the old well 

128 


IX—Power of Sentiment 


in Bethlehem. They drew out of it a jug of water 
and brought it back by the same perilous route 
until they delivered it into the hands of the king. 
They ventured everything on the strength of a 
sentiment which they cherished vase the ruler 
of their country. 

It was not a very sensible thing to do when we 
come to think of it. They might have been killed, 
and the lives of three good men are worth more 
than a jug of water from any well on earth. “It 
showed a lack of common sense,” I hear some 
practical man saying to himself. But man does not 
live by common sense alone—if he tries to do it 
he dies in certain areas of his nature. The con- 
siderations of prudence may point to a certain 
conclusion as solid and verifiable as the state- 
ments of the multiplication table and as power- 
less to move the heart to its higher levels of feel- 
ing and purpose. The finger of expediency may 
indicate a certain line of action as clear and plain 
as the North Star and as coldly remote from 
human well-being. We are hearts as well as 
heads. We are hearts even more than we are 
heads. “Out of the heart are the issues of life,” 
for men and women do mostly those things which 
they feel like doing. ‘With the heart man believ- 
eth unto righteousness,” and the man who roots 
out all sentiment from his life to make more room 
for the chilly dictates of expediency has made a 
sorry trade. 

129 


Yale Talks 


“The night has a thousand eyes 
And the day but one; 
Yet the light of the whole world dies 
When the sun is gone. 


“The mind has a thousand eyes 
And the heart but one; 
Yet the light of a whole life dies 
When love is done.” 


Keep, therefore, thy heart with all diligence! 
Keep it filled and charged with tender devotion 
and joyous enthusiasm, with gracious longings 
and high resolves, for out of it are the issues of 
life. 

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, 
wise men came from the East. And when they 
found Him with Mary, His Mother, “they opened 
their treasures and presented Him gifts, gold, 
frankincense and myrrh.” The gold was all very 
well—it could be used to purchase something for 
a family so poor that they were compelled to 
sleep in a stable. But the frankincense and 
myrrh had no such practical value. They were 
the offerings of sentiment and moral imagination. 
They belonged to the poetry rather than the prose 
of life. 

And all that has large place in the Christian 
scheme of things. It ranks with Mary’s alabaster 
box of perfume, which she used to anoint the head 
and feet of Christ. The commercial instinct of 

130 


I X—Power of Sentiment 


a practical man who did not turn out very well 
was offended on that occasion. He said, “It might 
have been sold for so much,” naming the price, 
“and the money given to the poor.” Yes, it might 
have been sold, but neither rich nor poor live by 
cash alone. ‘They live, if they live at all, by all 
the great words which proceed out of the mouth 
of God, faith, hope, love, sentiment, devotion, 
enthusiasm. The Master defended the woman’s 
action—She hath wrought a beautiful work on 
Me.” The beautiful work as an expression of 
wholesome sentiment has large place in the de- 
velopment of character. 

Here in this broad land fifty odd years ago we 
had a civil war. A million men from the North 
went down to fight against another million men 
more or less in the South. And the men from the 
North fought on until they had won a notable 
victory. What made them do it? What kept 
them at it during those four terrible years? It 
was not a pleasant nor a profitable thing to do, 
but they left their farms and their factories, their 
mills and their mines, their homes and _ their 
families, and went down South to be shot at. 
They received “$14 a month and hard-tack,” yet 
they turned their backs on all that they held dear 
and went down cheerily to hardship and danger, 
to disease and death. 

It was just a bit of sentiment on their part. 
They believed in the integrity of this country and 

rot 


Yale Talks 


they could not bear the thought of having it rent 
in twain. They loved the flag, which is only a 
piece of bunting to a man without sentiment, and 
they were set upon keeping all those stars together 
in one common field of blue. And moved by these 
sentiments they fought on under the leadership 
of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant until 
the Union was preserved and the slaves were 
freed. The finest chapters in the moral history of 
the race have been written by men who moved 
out in the strong grip of some noble sentiment. 

You may go still further. Here is the final force, 
the cardinal fact in the moral universe, “God so 
loved the world that He gave his only begotten 
Son.” He loved the world though it was unworthy 
of his love. He loved us while we were yet 
sinners. He loved us not because we deserved it, 
but because we needed it. His own knowledge 
told Him that in many instances His love would 
be spurned. But He loved until He gave. And 
that unstudied, undeserved affection which a 
father feels for his children, even though they 
have been doing wrong, is the driving force be- 
hind this whole redemptive process which is at 
last to save men from the guilt and power of their 
sins. The greatest thing in the world is love and 
love in the last analysis is a sentiment of intelli- 
gent good will. 

The three mighty men broke through the host 
of the Philistines and brought David a drink of 


132 


I1X—Power of Sentiment 


water from the old well. You could not have 
hired them to do it. They would not have im- 
periled their lives in that fashion for a bit of pay. 
The choicest things in life are never purchased— 
a woman’s kiss of affection, the fine, uncalculating 
friendship which one man cherishes for another, 
the devoted self-sacrifice of a mother, the life- 
blood of a patriot poured out for his country— 
these great values in life are never bought and 
sold as if they were meat and potatoes. They 
are freely given away by the generous souls who 
have them to offer. 

We cannot allow our ministry to the poor to 
become merely practical and utilitarian without 
degrading it. The poor people are not mere backs 
and bellies to be clothed and filled. They, too, 
are minds and hearts. They have sensibilities 
and aspirations which crave their satisfaction at 
the hands of kindly intelligent interest. The 
social worker may read the “Survey” regularly 
and have at his tongue’s end all the latest words 
of scientific charity, but if he has never sensed 
the fragrance of Mary’s alabaster box he is 
grossly incompetent for his task. The finer senti- 
ments which have their place in the lives of rich 
and poor alike are more precious than rubies or 
diamonds. 

We have all read “The Charge of the Light 
Brigade,” and some of us declaimed it in the days 
of our youth. “It is a brave description of a 


133 


Yale Talks 


brave ride,” as Myron Reed once said. The 
colonel of the fated regiment at Balaklava re- 
ceived his order, gathered up his bridle-rein and 
swung himself into the saddle, saying, “Here goes 
the last of the Cardigans and thirteen thousand 
pounds a year!”” When a young man is the eldest 
son of a lord and has an income of sixty-five thou- 
sand dollars a year coming to him, he has a good 
deal to lose. And when he lays it all down for 
the sake of a forlorn hope simply because it 
belongs to his military duty, he is a good deal of 
a soldier. 

“It was magnificent,” someone has said, “but 
it was not war.” I am not so sure about that. If 
we could reckon up all the moral courage, all the 
devotion to an ideal, and all the public spirit 
kindled by the action of those six hundred men, 
it might seem that they had made a royal invest- 
ment of their lives. “Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and 
die, Noble six hundred.” On all the higher levels 
of action, the world is ruled mainly by those senti- 
ments which rise supreme above the lesser con- 
siderations. Keep, therefore, thy heart with all 
diligence for out of it are the issues of life! 

When the three mighty men brought the jug of 
water to David he would not drink it. Here it 
was, water from Bethlehem, clear and cold as it 
was in the days when he saw the bucket come up 
dripping from the bottom of the well! Here 


134 


1X—Power of Sentiment 


were the three men who had brought it standing 
by to witness his satisfaction, their own faces 
flushed with the joy of their success and their 
hearts beating high with the love they bore him. 

But David would not touch a drop of it. It 
would have choked him. He poured out a cup of 
it and held it up to the light. It had become in- 
vested with a new kind of sacredness in his eyes. 
It had become like the blood-red wine of the 
Sacrament. It was too precious to be used for 
any private gratification, even though the gratifi- 
cation might be as innocent as the slaking of 
thirst with cold water. “Far be it from me, O 
Lord! Is not this the lifeblood of those men 
who went in jeopardy of their lives!” He carried 
it apart and poured it out in sacramental fashion 
unto the Lord. 

Here again I hear some practical man scoff! 
“Why did he not drink it after the three men had 
taken all that trouble to get it! It would not do 
the Lord any good to pour it out before Him. 
He might have given those men the satisfaction of 
seeing him drink it.” 

But there are things which become invested 
with values which make them too precious to be 
used for any kind of physical gratification. In 
that hour the soul of the man rises above all 
physical needs. His capacity for worship craves 
its satisfaction in ways which the materialist 
knows not of. His kinship with the Eternal 


135 


Yale Talks 


asserts itself and he is intent upon strengthening 
that bond which unites his soul with the Soul of 
the Infinite. 

When General Grant retired from the presi- 
dency, he made his celebrated tour around the 
world. He was honored in all lands and was re- 
ceived by many_of the crowned heads. When he 
reached Japan he went, naturally, to the city of 
Nikko, the city of shrines, and the burial place of 
the two great Japanese heroes, Iyeyasu and lye- 
mitsu. There at Nikko is the famous red lacquer 
bridge across the river, upon which no man has 
ever walked save only the sacred person of the 
Emperor. 

But as a mark of honor to his American guest 
and in gratitude for the friendship he had en- 
joyed, the Emperor gave direction that when 
General Grant visited Nikko the sacred bridge 
should be opened and that he should be allowed 
to walk across. 

Then our great American soldier showed that 
he, too, had all the fine qualities of an uncrowned 
king. He expressed his deep sense of apprecia- 
tion for the honor the Emperor had shown him 
and declined to cross the bridge, so that the sacred 
tradition might be kept inviolate. It was only a 
bit of sentiment on both sides, but nobly con- 
ceived and nobly expressed it served to strengthen 
the bond of friendship between that land and ours 
—a friendship, may it please God, which must 

136 


IX—Power of Sentiment 


never be broken by the careless tongues or wicked 
hands of thoughtless men! Nations as well as 
individuals are moved to those lines of action 
which write the noblest pages of their history by 
the sentiments which possess the heart. 

How mighty would be the power of moral 
imagination could we exercise it upon many of 
the commodities of our daily life! Here is a 
young man holding in his hand his monthly allow- 
ance of spending money! He is blind if he thinks 
that the value of that money can be stated in 
dollars and cents. Money has in it the potentiali- 
ties of life or of death. It is an expression of life. 
Into the creation of that bit of value toiling men 
and women have put the sweat of brow or of 
brain. If the young man has eyes to see, he will 
say to himself, “Is not this the lifeblood of those 
toilers who gave of their best that this value might 
be created? Far be it from me to use it care- 
lessly, ungratefully, wickedly.” He would feel 
that he was drinking in insolent fashion the heart 
blood of those toilers if he used a dollar of it in 
unworthy indulgence. 

Here is a woman who rustles into her parlor in 
all the elegance of her silk and lace! Would God 
that all such luxury had been made possible by 
commercial and industrial methods which Jesus 
Christ would approve. In many cases it is not so. 
If that woman could see the tired faces and broken 
bodies of girls working for long hours in factories, 


137 


Yale Talks 


in sweat shops or in huge department stores where 
pay is sometimes kept down that profits may be 
kept up, she would hate the rustle of her finery. 
She would say, “Far be it from me, O Lord—is 
not this the wornout tissues of those other lives 
that I am wearing for my own pleasure?” She 
could not rest. until she was doing something 
to bring about better industrial methods and a 
more equitable distribution of the good things of 
life. 

Here is a whole family, the children of good 
fortune, sitting at an open-grate fire in winter. 
If they could see in that glowing coal the burned- 
out vitality and stunted growth of underpaid 
miners who went in jeopardy of their lives that 
we might have coal brought to us from the bowels 
of the earth; if they could see the underpaid 
breaker boys at the mouth of the pit, their hands 
torn and bleeding as they pick out the slate, and 
their lungs blackened by the grime and dust, it 
would be impossible for them to sit there in open 
indifference to the lot of their less fortunate fel- 
lows. There would be developed in them a pas- 
sion for social justice which would not rest until 
they had done something to change all that. 

Let me apply that same principle to another 
still more vital interest! What is it that keeps 
thousands of strong, red-blooded men in all our 
cities clean and straight? ‘The considerations of 
prudence are weak when measured against the 

138 


IX—Power of Sentiment 


surging passions of youth. The fear of physical 
contagion or the dread of social disgrace are 
utterly inadequate to offset the temptations which 
are offered in every great city. The decent man 
is kept decent by the fact that he is too chivalrous 
to find pleasure in the degradation of a woman’s 
life. The banishment of a daughter from her 
father’s house or the wreck of a woman’s life, 
who ought to be a happy wife and mother in her 
own home is too vile for his countenance. “Far 
be it from me, O Lord,” he cries. “Not a dollar 
of my money nor an ounce of my strength shall go 
to the maintenance of a system which year by year 
sends a multitude of misguided girls down a swift, 
short, sharp descent into physical and moral hell.” 
Find pleasure in that—it would be like drinking 
the lifeblood of a fellow mortal, and a woman 
at that, for one’s physical gratification! He 
scorns it, as every true man must. 

Teach that to your boys as they grow up. 
Teach it to yourself. The great safeguard of 
manly honor and of womanly purity is not to be 
found in statutes nor in policemen. It is not to 
be found in the frightful charts compiled by medi- 
cal men nor in the statistics prepared by eugenic 
societies. It is to be found in the development 
of that fine spirit of chivalry which David showed 
three thousand years ago when he refused to slake 
his thirst on water which represented the lifeblood 
of a fellow being. The very basis of morality is 


139 


Yale Talks 


to be found in that instinctive respect which every 
right-minded man feels for the personality of 
another. No man is a good man who lacks that, 
and every man who has it refuses to purchase 
his pleasure or his profit at the cost of the degrada- 
tion of any human soul. 

Here then is.my story, and it is a story of the 
heart. The homesick longing of a king for an- 
other taste of the innocent joys of his youth! The 
readiness of three brave men to hazard their lives 
in order to bring him what he craved because 
they loved him! The fine unwillingness of that 
King to use what they brought as being now too 
costly and sacred to be given to anyone save the 
Lord! Three bits of that noble sentiment which 
has power to move the heart to those higher levels 
of feeling and purpose. | 

Out of the heart are the issues of life. There- 
fore keep your heart in the presence of those 
things which are true, pure and just, honorable, 
lovable and reputable. Keep it there until the 
inevitable reaction comes in finer forms of feeling. 
Then let those feelings course through your veins 
like rich red blood and the God of peace shall be 
with you! 


140 


x 
The Wounds of Wrongdoing 


ERE in the Bible we find human nature at 

its best and at its worst! ‘There is light 
and there is shade and both are needed to give 
the right effect in pictures and in plays and in 
Bibles. We see men bearing themselves so nobly 
upon the stage of action that the Psalmist is 
moved to say, “Thou hast made man a little lower 
than the angels.” We see men acting so basely 
that the Apostle is moved to say, “God has given 
them up to the uncleanness of their hearts and 
they have changed the truth into a lie.” It is all 
there in the Book because it is all herein us. The 
Bible holds the mirror up to human nature and 
shows us every line in her old face. 

Here in a familiar story we find words so full 
of life that if you should cut into them they would 
bleed. The words are the words of a king, but 
the cry is the cry of a father. He was a man 
first and a king afterward. If all the jeweled 
crowns of earth had been piled upon his head in 
that hour they would not have kept back that sob. 
He had been hard hit and now every syllable he 
utters is full of pain. “O Absalom, my son, my 

I4I 


Yale Talks 


son! Would God I had died for thee!” If I could 
take those words and write them upon the mind of 
every man here as they stand written on that page 
of Scripture, the hour would be well spent. 

You find there three of the plain, elemental 
facts in human experience—first, the love of a 
father for his son. The father’s name was David, 
and he was a king. His son, therefore, was a 
prince of the realm from his birth. He was a 
handsome young fellow. “In all Israel there was 
none so much to be praised for his beauty as 
Absalom. From the sole of his foot to the crown 
of his head there was no blemish in him.” He 
was not sent into the world like Richard III, half 
made up, deformed, unfinished, so that dogs would 
bark when he limped by. He was a fine-looking 
young chap. 

He was easy and affable in his manner. “When 
any man came nigh to do him obeisance, Absalom 
put forth his hand and took him up and kissed 
him.” In that region where the idea still persisted 
that a certain divinity doth hedge about a king, 
this democratic spirit on the part of the young 
prince was most engaging. 

He loved a good turnout. “He prepared for 
himself chariots and horses and fifty men to run 
before him.” It was as if a modern young man 
of the fortunate class should have the use of half- 
a-dozen high-priced automobiles. “My father 
can afford it,” he might say, “Why shouldn’t I?” 

142 


X—Wounds of Wrongdoing 


This young man was a prince and he looked the 
part and acted the part. 

In all this his father loved him as he loved his 
own soul. The father had been a shepherd boy 
in his youth. He had led the sheep in green pas- 
tures and by still waters, driving off the wolves 
and the bears with sling and stone. But now that 
he had risen from those lowly surroundings to 
a place of power and influence, he found a peculiar 
joy in satisfying the ambitions of his handsome 
son. His affection for him was so real and so 
warm that he lived his own life over again with 
many an added pleasure in the unfolding life of 
his boy. You could see his eye kindle and hear 
a new resonance in his voice when he spoke of his 
son. 

If you want to find any man at his best find 
him as a father. Take the strong and tender out- 
goings of his nature in the love he bears for his 
child. In the love of a man for a woman there Is 
more of the sense of give and take. It is an inter- 
change of joys between equals in their sweet com- 
panionship. But in the love of a parent for a 
child the very unselfishness of that high interest 
clothes it with an added beauty. And this father 
whose name was David loved his son Absalom 
with a beautiful affection which was like the sun 
shining in its strength. It is against that fair 
white screen that the darker pictures in this pas- 
sage are to be shown. 


143 


Yale Talks 


In the second place, we find the son’s rejection 
of his father’s love. Here was a young man 
doomed to defeat by the very wealth of his advan- 
tages! Had he been compelled to make his own 
way up from some other sheepfold, he might have 
won out. But he had everything—everything but 
a soul, and that is something each one must win 
for himself no matter where he was born. 

He was the son of a king with all the advan- 
tages and all the perils of high position. He was 
handsome, and he was courted and flattered until 
his head was turned clear around so that he looked 
habitually the wrong way. He was a favorite son 
and he had been petted until he felt that God had 
made him a good deal better than the angels. He 
felt that he was “the whole thing,” and when 
any young man acquires such an aggravated case 
of enlarged head “on both sides,” as we say in 
pneumonia, nothing but a double portion of divine 
. grace can save him. 

This young prince made up his mind that he 
would like to be king at once without waiting for 
the slow process of nature to remove his father 
from the throne. He organized a rebellion and 
went about sowing the seeds of discord in his 
father’s kingdom with both hands. He stood at 
the gates of the city where he would meet the 
disaffected. When any man had a lawsuit and 
came to the king for judgment, Absalom would 
say to him, “Thy matter is good and right, but 


144 


X—Wounds of Wrongdoing 


there is no one deputed of the king to hear thee. 
O, that I were made judge in this land that every 
man might come to me and I would do him jus- 
tice.” We all know the impatience of disap- 
pointed litigants. We have read “Bleak House” 
and we remember “Jarndyce and Jarndyce.” The 
delays of the court are proverbial and in the hearts 
of those disaffected subjects this false son planted 
the seeds of rebellion. ; 
“Thus Absalom stole the hearts of the men of 
Israel.” From start to finish, it was a lying, 
thievish transaction. His gracious manner clothed 
a treacherous heart. His showy courtesy was only | 
a polished tool to gain his ends. His apparent 
interest in those who suffered from the delays of 
the courts masked his own desire to sit upon the’ 
throne at once. 
He knew that all this would cut his father to: 
the quick. It was the sin against love. It was 
the action of a thoughtless, reckless nature ready 
to stab to the heart those who held him dear. All 
sin is just that. The laws of right and wrong 
are not abstract principles imposed upon us by 
arbitrary authority. They are the expression of 
an intelligent good will intent upon our well-being. 
“Honor thy father and thy mother that thy 
days may be long in the land the Lord thy God 
giveth thee.” ‘This was the word of God from 
Sinai, and it is the word of every honest heart. 
The very foundations of the whole moral struc- 


145 


Yale Talks 


ture are laid in the rightly ordered home. The 
fidelities and sanctities, the sympathies and sacri- 
fices of family life are meant to be a finite copy 
of the infinite, moral order which enfolds us. 
They are meant to be a perpetual revelation of 
Him from whom the whole family in Heaven and 
earth is named. “Honor thy father and thy 
mother”—it is the first command with promise, 
and the sons and daughters of men who disregard 
it, do so at their peril. Here in our story a hand- 
some young prince who rebelled against the love 
of his father was doomed. He broke the first 
command with promise and his days were not long 
in the land the Lord gave him. 

He moved ahead in black ingratitude, treacher- 
ously plotting against the authority of the king. 
In furthering his design he added to all his other 
evil deeds the uglier sin of religious hypocrisy. 
He knew the simple, genuine piety of his father’s 
heart. He had thus far given that father small 
comfort by his own attitude toward religion. He 
was a godless as well as a thankless son. 

But now he announces to his father that he had 
made a religious vow which must be paid at 
Hebron, one of the sacred shrines of the older He- 
brew faith. The heart of David rejoiced over 
this sign of an emerging piety in the life of the 
wayward son. Then, ostensibly to make a devout 
pilgrimage, but in reality to proclaim his revolu- 
tion at the place which had once been the capital 

146 


X—Wounds of Wrongdoing 


of the country, Absalom sets out for Hebron. 
“And thus I clothe my naked villainy in old, odd 
ends stolen forth from Holy Writ and seem a 
saint when most I play the devil.” 

What a frightful thing it is to borrow the livery 
of Heaven to serve Satan! When Charles IT took 
the Covenant insincerely, merely to enlist the sup- 
port of the Scotch, the world condemned him more 
severely for that than for his open acts of wicked- 
ness. He was counterfeiting the coin of the realm 
in spiritual affairs. When the false French king, 
devoid of religious conviction, received the sacred 
rites of the Roman Church, saying in cynical 
fashion, “Paris is surely worth a mass or two,” 
his deed was held in greater abhorrence than were 
his acts of immorality. The world hates a liar. 
It demands that every man should be real, whether 
he is gold or brass. 

Yonder at sacred Hebron this false, rebellious 
son set up his standards of revolt. He called upon 
the followers he had won to make their attack 
upon rightful authority. It came so swiftly that 
at first it was successful. The king was actually 
driven from his capital in painful, perilous flight. 
He suffered this grievous wrong at the hands of 
the son of his love. 

But the success of that ill-starred movement 
was short-lived. When the experienced generals 
and able warriors of the old king were once set 
in battle array, they speedily proved too much for 


147 


Yale Talks 


the raw recruits of the young prince. The rebels 
were routed and there was a great slaughter of 
twenty thousand of their men. The cowardly 
leader of the revolt, intent upon saving himself, 
abandoned his army and fled for his life upon 
his own mule into the midst of a thicket. Here 
the long hair which had been kept in his vanity 
proved his undoing. His hair caught in the prickly 
boughs of an overhanging oak. While he was 
struggling to release himself his mule ran out from 
under him, leaving him half suspended and help- 
less. Here the soldiers of the king overtook him 
and shot him through the heart with three sharp 
darts, leaving him dead in the midst of the oak. 
And that was the end of the young man who re- 
belled against the love of a father. 

We come now to the third scene, the father’s 
grief over the fall of his son. When that fateful 
day dawned for the battle of the king’s army 
with the forces of revolt, the king himself sat in 
the gate awaiting news from the field. He had 
charged his ablest general Joab the day before, 
“Deal gently with the young man for my sake— 
deal gently with Absalom.” While he sat thus in 
the gate one of his courtiers with younger, keener 
eyes Saw a man running. When the runner drew 
near he called out, ‘‘All is well! Blessed be the 
Lord who hath delivered up the men who rose 
against my lord, the king.” 

But the king brushed aside this report of mili- 

148 


X—Wounds of Wrongdoing 


tary success—“Is the young man safe?” he cried, 
“Is Absalom safe?” ‘This runner did not know. 
Then another man was seen running and when 
he drew near he called out, “The Lord hath 
avenged thee this day against all them that rose 
up against thee.” But the king again thrust aside 
this report of victory—‘“Is the young man Ab- 
salom safe?” This messenger had been in the 
thicket when the end came and he added in quiet 
tones, “May all the enemies of my lord, the king, 
who rise up against thee to do thee hurt, be as 
that young man is!” 

The truth was out. His son was dead, and dead 
in the hour of his wrongdoing. He had sinned 
against love. In cruel, treacherous fashion he was 
showing his contempt for his father’s love at the 
very moment when he was shot through the heart 
by the darts of Joab. 

The king’s son was dead and he was disgraced. 
Where now in this wide world shall this broken- 
hearted father look for comfort! This was the 
sorry return which the handsome young prince 
had made for all the wealth of affection poured 
out upon him. “O Absalom, my son, my son,” he 
cried, “would God I had died for thee!” And 
then “the king went up to his chamber over the 
gate”—it was a narrow little room. It does not 
take a very big place for a man to cry in. And 
the king was there alone with his griefi—his own 
son had broken his heart. 


149 


Yale Talks 


How these lives of ours are knit up with all 
those other lives! No man liveth unto himself, no 
man dieth unto himself, no man sinneth unto him- 
self. We are all bound together in a moral soli- 
darity from which there is no escape. You 
thought that sin of yours was all your own affair 
—that was all you knew about it. You found out 
to your sorrow that it was not so. It was his 
affair and hers and His. When you covered your 
own life with shame, they were all shamed. 
When you stooped to that which was wrong, they 
all suffered. They suffered more than you did 
because they were better and because they loved 
you more than you loved them, or you would not 
have done it. The tears which came in their eyes, 
and the break which came in their voices, and the 
weight which settled down upon their hearts were 
all put there by your wrongdoing. 

If fathers and sons alike could exercise in ad- 
vance a bit of moral imagination touching the 
effect of their wrongdoing upon each other, it 
would serve as a mighty deterrent. A rough work- 
ingman left his home one winter morning in 
Chicago on his way to the factory. There had 
been a heavy snowfall the night before. Because 
the day was cold and the man was not feeling 
quite up to the mark, he decided that he must 
have a bracer before he went to his work. He 
was heading for the rum shop at the.next corner. 
As he plowed his way along through the snow he 


150 


{ 


X—Wounds of Wrongdoing 


heard a small voice pipe out behind him, “Father, 
I am coming, too. I am putting my feet in your 
tracks.” 

The man did not go to the saloon that morning 
when the significance of the situation dawned 
upon him. He would make no tracks into the 
door of a rum shop for his boy. And if every 
son on earth could look ahead and picture to him- 
self the pain and the loss which his evildoing 
would bring to the heart of his father, it would 
give him pause. He would say as one said long 
ago, “How can I! How can I smite the fair face 
of affection with the foul hand of an evil deed?” 

It matters little what form this rebellion against 
love may take. It may take any one of a thou- 
sand forms. Here in the story it took the form 
of a political conspiracy against the rightful 
authority of the king. It may come in the coarse 
sins of the flesh, which bring the flush of shame 
to the faces of parents when their own sons are 
guilty. It may take the form of arrogance, selfish- 
ness, cold contempt for the dearest desires and 
aspirations of those who love us. It may come 
in a flippant, scornful rejection of those principles 
of godly living which mean everything to those 
who hold us dear. In each case the evil is the same 
—the thoughtless, selfish, godless soul draws his 
dagger and stabs the heart of affection to the core. 
In each case it is a sin against love, and I care not 
where that evildoer may be doing his own bit of 

151 


Yale Talks 


iniquity, if he will listen he will hear that old He- 
brew yonder on the hills of Judea sobbing yet. 
“O Absalom, my son, would God I had died for 
thee!” 

We face here one of the cardinal truths of our 
Christian faith. Why is there a cross on the spire 
of the church? What does Calvary mean to us? 
What moral efficacy has that great truth of the 
atonement? The main force of it all lies here. 
When the Son of Man suffered at the hands of 
evil men on Calvary, it was a revelation in time 
of something which is eternal and universal. It 
was the supreme manifestation of the eternal 
heartache and heartbreak in the life of God be- 
cause of the sins of His children. There is a 
Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. 
When any man sins the guilt of it and the pain 
of it are felt all the way up to the Great White 
Throne because the man is a child of God, and 
the God who sits upon that throne is “Our 
Father.” He is wounded by our transgressions. 
He is bruised by our iniquities. It is by His 
stripes that we are healed and the chastisement of 
our peace is upon Him. The cry of the king, “O 
Absalom, my son,” is a human echo of the divine 
cry which comes to us across the ages. 

Hear this old Hebrew saying what fatherhood 
has always said in the presence of the evil doing 
of its children—“O Absalom, my son, how could 
your” You notice the term he uses even in that 

152 


X—Wounds of Wrongdoing 


hour of pain. He does not say, “Absalom, the 
traitor, the leader of a political revolt, the dema- 
gogue who stole the hearts of the people.” It was, 
“Absalom, my son,” and that was the tragedy of 
it. And the father of the prodigal in that classical 
passage on redemption in harking back to the 
days of his pain did not say—‘“‘That fast young 
man who wasted his substance in riotous living! 
That spendthrift who ran through all I gave him - 
and began to be in want.” It was none of this— 
“It is meet that we should make merry, for this 
my son was lost and is found; he was dead and 
is alive again.” It is “my son” throughout, for 
there is a love that will not let us go. 

When we turn the reverse side of this shield, 
how glorious are the lines engraved upon it! 
Nothing on earth or in Heaven suffers as affection 
suffers when it is outraged by the objects of its 
devotion. And nothing on earth or in Heaven 
can rejoice as affection rejoices when it sees the 
travail of its soul and is satisfied in the realization 
of its dearest hopes. 

Have the skies ever heard a lovelier strain of 
music than the one which broke through when 
Jesus of Nazareth was baptized in the river Jor- 
dan? It was God the Father who spoke in that 
high hour and said, “This is My Beloved Son in 
whom I am well pleased!” Here was a Son 
who did always the Will of the Father! Here 
was a Son who at the end of His life could 


153 


Yale Talks 


look up and say, “Father, I have finished the 
work Thou gavest Me to do.” And the satisfac- 
tion of that Father’s heart in that supreme hour 
over the right life of His Son was enough to set all 
the angels in the skies to singing. 

T have thought of all this many times in these 
recent months when the call has come for the 
young men of our country to don the garb of 
public service. There were shortsighted indi- 
viduals who were saying that the sons of good 
fortune were given over to luxury and self-indulg- 
ence, that the moral fibre had been eaten out of 
them. How little they knew! The fine material 
of moral passion and of national vigor was all 
there in waiting. When the voice of the President 
and of a great international necessity rang out 
saying, “‘Who will go for us, whom shall we send?” 
the response came back in that same hour from 
the best we breed, ‘“Here am I, send me.” 

And when they came to be weighed in the bal- 
ance, they were not found wanting. They had 
not laid waste their powers in dissipation and vice. 
They were able to pass those medical examina- 
tions which take only the firstlings of the flock. 
It was the battle of the Lord which was to be 
fought and they were lined up on the side of moral 
idealism. 

It has brought anxious days and sleepless hours 
at night to the hearts of the fathers and mothers 
who have seen them go. They loved their boys 


154 


X—Wounds of Wrongdoing 


as David loved Absalom and now they saw them 
going forth into the realm of fire and sword. The 
parents could only remain behind to wait and 
watch and pray. 

But how much more terrible it would have been 
in those grave times had their sons been all unwill- 
ing or unfit for that high service! How much 
more grievous had these parents been compelled 
to see what David saw, the lives of their sons 
stained with cowardice and treachery! The 
hearts of those fathers and mothers, heavy with a 
great anxiety, could still look up to Him who 
spared not His own Son, but freely delivered Him 
up for us all. They could gain from Him comfort 
and courage for their own hour of need. 

And nowhere has this response of young man- 
hood to the call of duty been more complete or 
more satisfying than in our colleges. We have 
seen it here on the Campus at Yale as other men 
and women have seen it in all the colleges and 
universities of the land. The spirit of it has been 
finely expressed in these lines. 


“T saw the spires of Oxford 
As I was passing by, 
Thé gray spires of Oxford 
Against a pearl-gray sky. 
My heart was with the Oxford men 
Who went abroad to die. 


155 


Yale Talks 


“The years go fast in Oxford, 
The golden years and gay; 
The hoary colleges look down 
On careless boys at play; 
But when the bugles sounded war, 
They put their games away. 


“They left the peaceful river, 
The cricket-field, the quad, 
The shaven lawns of Oxford, 
To seek a bloody sod— 
They gave their merry youth away 
For country and for God. 


“God rest you, happy gentlemen, 
Who laid your good lives down, 
Who took the khaki and the gun 
Instead of cap and gown. 
God bring you to a fairer place 
Than even Oxford town.” 


And when those young men, who have been 
Striving to do the will of the Father, have fought 
their good fight and have finished their course 
and have kept their faith, they will find laid up 
for them a crown of rejoicing. They will find 
that they have filled the hearts of their fathers 
on earth and of their Father in Heaven with a 
joy unspeakable. 


156 











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